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A man able to think isn't defeated - even when he is defeated.

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
Defeated
Able
Even
Men
Think
Thinking

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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God has been kind to dogs in no putting a sense of beauty into their heads.
Milan Kundera
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Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest.
Milan Kundera
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La memoria no guarda películas, guarda fotografías.
Milan Kundera
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...no one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there's no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.
Milan Kundera
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People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case animals have the right to a merciful death.
Milan Kundera
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We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.
Milan Kundera
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Speak truth to power.
Milan Kundera
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The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.
Milan Kundera
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She is sadder and sadder, and for a man there is no balm more soothing than the sadness he has caused a woman.
Milan Kundera
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Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
Milan Kundera
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loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.
Milan Kundera
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Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.
Milan Kundera
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Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.
Milan Kundera
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...[P]eople who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all... (p.24)
Milan Kundera
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But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master?
Milan Kundera
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But then he told himself: What does it really mean to be useful? Today's world, just as it is, contains the sum of the utility of all people of all times. Which implies: The highest morality consists in being useless.
Milan Kundera
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All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit of no transgression.
Milan Kundera
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Mankind's real moral test, a test so radical and so deep that it escapes our gaze, is probably the one of its relations with those that are the most at its mercy the Animals.
Milan Kundera