Quote

As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom.

Milan Kundera

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Milan Kundera
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: April 1
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Brünn
Unhappy
Choice
Either
Choices
Happy
Freedom
Live
Desolation
Constitutes

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We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.
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The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.
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You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
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The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.
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The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
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To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.
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Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.
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A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.
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The best actors do not let the wheels show.
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Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.
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And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
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People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.
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The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.
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Radio... force-feeds us music... everywhere and all the time... sewage-water music in which music is dying.
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Beauty has long since disappeared. It has slipped beneath the surface of the noise, the noise of words, sunk deep as Atlantis. The only thing left of it is the word, whose meaning loses clarity from year to year.
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Happiness is the longing for repetition.
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Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
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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.
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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.
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