Milan Kundera
Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.
Man's world is the planet of inexperience.
I remember that the day I finished 'The Angels,' part three of 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative.
The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was... The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.Collection: Memories
The man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present... he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future... he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.Collection: Inspirational
The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.Collection: People
The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.Collection: Past
When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Past
There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.Collection: Age
The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.Collection: Mean
a man possessed with peace is always smilingCollection: Men
Modern stupidity means not ignorance but the nonthought of received ideasCollection: Mean
The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries.Collection: Lying
A man is responsible for his ignorance.Collection: Ignorance
Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.Collection: Memories
Beauty is a rebellion against time.Collection: Rebellion
In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.Collection: Answers
Merely by being born intelligent, you right away find yourself in absolute exile.Collection: Intelligent
You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.Collection: Love
Sad company is bad company.Collection: Bad Company
There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact. In the course of a single second, our senses of sight, of hearing, of smell, register (knowingly or not) a swarm of events and a parade of sensations and ideas passes through our head. Each instant represents a little universe, irrevocably forgotten in the next instant.Collection: Lying
Just imagine living in a world without mirrors. You'd dream about your face and imagine it as an outer reflection of what is inside you. And then, when you reached forty, someone put a mirror before you for the first time in your life. Imagine your fright! You'd see the face of a stranger. And you'd know quite clearly what you are unable to grasp: your face is not you.Collection: Dream
There is no perfection only lifeCollection: Perfection
I think, therefore I am' is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.Collection: Intelligent
At a time when history made its way slowly, the few events were easily remembered and woven into a backdrop, known to everyone, before which private life unfolded the gripping show of its adventures. Nowadays, time moves forward at a rapid pace. Forgotten overnight, a historic event glistens the next day like the morning dew and thus is no longer the backdrop to a narrator's tale but rather an amazing adventure enacted against the background of the over-familiar banality of private life.Collection: Morning
Business only has two functions - innovation and marketing.Collection: Two
How did the senator know that children meant happiness? Could he see into their souls? What if the moment they were out of sight, three of them jumped the fourth and began beating him up?Collection: Children
Necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.Collection: Three
The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.Collection: Memories
Children are the future, because mankind is moving more and more towards infancy.Collection: Children
The rediscovered path, where were left the traces of childhood's lost steps.Collection: Childhood
For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought.Collection: Flames
Tereza had gone back to sleep; he could not. He pictured her death. She was dead and having terrible nightmares; but because she was dead, he was unable to wake her from them. Yes, that is death: Tereza asleep, having terrible nightmares, and he unable to wake her.Collection: Sleep
Is not parody the eternal lot of man?Collection: Men
Fortunately women have the miraculous ability to change the meaning of their actions after the event.Collection: Women
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?Collection: Men
The pressure to make public retractions of past statements - there's something medieval about it. What does it mean, anyway, to 'retract' what you've said? How can anyone state categorically that a thought he once had is no longer valid? In modern times an idea can be refuted, yes, but not retracted.Collection: Mean
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!Collection: Lying
She is sadder and sadder, and for a man there is no balm more soothing than the sadness he has caused a woman.Collection: Sadness
The body was a cage, and inside that cage was something which looked, listened, feared, thought and marveled; that something, that remainder left over after the body had been accounted for, was the soul.Collection: Soul
She had come to him to escape her mother's world, a world where all bodies were equal. She had come to him to make her body unique, irreplaceble. But he, too had drawn an equal sign between her and the rest of them: he kissed them all alike, stroked them all alike, made no, absolutely no distiction between Tereza's body and the other bodies. He sent her back to the world she tried to escape, sent to march naked with the other naked womenCollection: Mother
She knew, of course that she was being supremely unfair, that Franz was the best man she ever had- he was intelligent, he understood her paintings, he was handsome and good-but the more she thought about it, the more she longed to ravish his intelligence, defile his kindheartedness, and violate his powerless strengthCollection: Intelligent
When she is older she will see in these resemblances a regrettable uniformity among individuals (they all stop at the same spots to kiss, have the same tastes in clothing, flatter a woman with the same metaphor) and a tedious monotony among events (they are all just an endless repetition of the same one); but in her adolescence she welcomes these coincidences as miraculous and she is avid to decipher their meanings.Collection: Kissing
By giving the love act a name, if only an innocent little word like, "it," he paved the way for other words, words that would reflect physical love as in a set of mirrors.Collection: Mirrors
To die; to decide to die; that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't death strip an adolescent of a far larger portion of future? Certainly it does, but for a young person, the future is a remote, abstract, unreal thing he doesn't really believe in.Collection: Believe
He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world’s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.Collection: Book
The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.Collection: Knowing