Milan Kundera Quotes About Unbearable Lightness
-
Happiness is the longing for repetition.
→ -
Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with.
→ -
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.
→ -
When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. And Sabina - what had come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden, but the unbearable lightness of being.
→ -
She had an overwhelming desire to tell him, like the most banal of women. Don't let me go, hold me tight, make me your plaything, your slave, be strong! But they were words she could not say. The only thing she said when he released her from his embrace was, "You don't know how happy I am to be with you." That was the most her reserved nature allowed her to express.
→ -
There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, "sketch" is not quite a word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.
→ -
Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor
→ -
You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.
→ -
But was it love? The feeling of wanting to die beside her was clearly exaggerated: he had seen her only once before in his life! Was it simply the hysteria of a man, who, aware deep down of his inaptitude for love, felt the self-deluding need to simulate it?
→ -
For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies.
→ -
Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.
→ -
Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.
→ -
Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.
→ -
Physical love is unthinkable without violence.
→ -
In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.
→ -
The heaviest of burdens is simultaneously an image of life's most intense fullfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into new heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?
→ -
Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo.
→ -
Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).
→ -
Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
→ -
we might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. he is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down.
→ -
Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.
→ -
The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.
→ -
And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
→ -
Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.
→ -
Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.
→ -
The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
→ -
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.
→ -
Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.
→ -
If excitement is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement, love is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee the Creator. Love is our freedom. Love lies beyond "Es Muss sein!
→ -
To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.
→
Related Authors
-
Philip Roth Novelist -
Josef Skvorecky Writer -
Umberto Eco Essayist -
Friedrich Nietzsche Philologist -
Lawrence Durrell Novelist -
Albert Camus Author -
Gabriel Garcia Marquez Novelist -
Franz Kafka Writer -
Philip Kaufman Film director -
Vaclav Havel Former President of Czechoslovakia -
Marguerite Duras Writer -
Ernest Hemingway Author -
Emile M. Cioran Philosopher -
Vladimir Nabokov Novelist -
Mario Vargas Llosa Writer -
Haruki Murakami Writer -
Italo Calvino Journalist -
Fyodor Dostoevsky Novelist -
Gunter Grass Novelist -
Bohumil Hrabal Writer