Quote

Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound.

Milan Kundera

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Milan Kundera
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: April 1
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Brünn
Total
Intently
Senses
Mobilization
Sound
Straining
Individual
Observes
Every
Sensuality
Partner
Catch
Partners

More quotes by Milan Kundera

Image
Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass.
Milan Kundera
Image
it is wrong to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences... but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life a dimension of beauty.
Milan Kundera
Image
The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.
Milan Kundera
Image
The senator had only one argument in his favour: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.
Milan Kundera
Image
The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.
Milan Kundera
Image
What is unique about the I hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual I is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.
Milan Kundera
Image
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!
Milan Kundera
Image
To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.
Milan Kundera
Image
It was futile to attack with reason the stout wall of irrational feelings that, as is known, is the stuff of which the female mind is made.
Milan Kundera
Image
what's the matter? he asked nothing what do you want me to do for you? i want you to be old. ten years older. twenty years older what she meant was: i want you to be weak. as weak as i am.
Milan Kundera
Image
[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.
Milan Kundera
Image
To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.
Milan Kundera
Image
Happiness is the longing for repetition.
Milan Kundera
Image
There is no perfection only life
Milan Kundera
Image
And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
Milan Kundera
Image
But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)
Milan Kundera
Image
At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.
Milan Kundera
Image
Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something - love - from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.
Milan Kundera
Image
Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.
Milan Kundera
Image
...in our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener)
Milan Kundera