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Anger
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A wave of anger washed over me, anger against myself, at my age at the time, that stupid lyrically age, when a man is too great a riddle to himself to be interested in the riddles outside himself and when other people are mere walking mirrors in which he is amazed to find his own emotions, his own worth.
-Milan Kundera
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Animals
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Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.
-Milan Kundera
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Authors & Writing
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A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.
-Milan Kundera
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All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.
-Milan Kundera
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Books
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The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.
-Milan Kundera
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For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
-Milan Kundera
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The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programs; or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold.
-Milan Kundera
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Change
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The word change, so dear to our Europe, has been given a new meaning: it no longer means a new stage of coherent development (as it was understood by Vico, Hegel or Marx), but a shift from one side to another, from front to back, from the back to the left, from the left to the front (as understood by designers dreaming up the fashion for the next season).
-Milan Kundera
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Criticism
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Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.
-Milan Kundera
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Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.
-Milan Kundera
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Culture
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High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor, only to be surpassed by his successor. Without this relay race called history there would be no European art and what characterizes it: a longing for originality, a longing for change. Robespierre, Napoleon, Beethoven, Stalin, Picasso, they're all runners in the relay race, they all belong to the same stadium.
-Milan Kundera
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Face, Faces
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The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen.
-Milan Kundera
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Future, The
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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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Goodness
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True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.
-Milan Kundera
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Happiness
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Happiness is the longing for repetition.
-Milan Kundera
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Humanity
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Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.
-Milan Kundera
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Identity
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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.
-Milan Kundera
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Image
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The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.
-Milan Kundera
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Individuality
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A gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as his creation (because no individual is capable of creating a fully original gesture, belonging to nobody else), nor can it even be regarded as that person's instrument; on the contrary, it is gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations.
-Milan Kundera
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Intelligence
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I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.
-Milan Kundera
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Kindness
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There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
-Milan Kundera
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Laughter
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The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
-Milan Kundera
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Life
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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 a sketch. No sketch is not quite the right word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch of nothing, an outline with no picture.
-Milan Kundera
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Memory
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The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
-Milan Kundera
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Mystics, Mysticism
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Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.
-Milan Kundera
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Books by and about Milan Kundera