Milan Kundera: Art arises from sources other than logic." (p.32)

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.

Milan Kundera

struggle memories book

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.

Milan Kundera

freedom time inspirational

Young is the one that plunges in the future and never looks back.

Milan Kundera

plunge young looks

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.

Milan Kundera

greek suffering mean

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

political people 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.

Milan Kundera

certain moments age

We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.

Milan Kundera

glances eye past

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

Milan Kundera

stupidity answers people

The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.

Milan Kundera

ambiguity pleasure greater

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.

Milan Kundera

mirrors reflection dream

[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.

Milan Kundera

collapse burden memories

The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.

Milan Kundera

liberty people world

We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under . . . The fourth category, the rarest, is the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.

Milan Kundera

dreamer eye people

Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.

Milan Kundera

film doe memories

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.

Milan Kundera

stress dog letting-go

Every love relationship rests on an unwritten agreement unthinkingly concluded by the lovers in the first weeks of their love. They are still in a kind of dream but at the same time, without knowing it, are drawing up, like uncompromising lawyers, the detailed clauses of their contract. O lovers! Be careful in those dangerous first days! Once you've brought breakfast in bed you'll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.

Milan Kundera

betrayal drawing dream

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

ability lying people

Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.

Milan Kundera

ambition inspirational funny

The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries.

Milan Kundera

anxiety worry lying

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.

Milan Kundera

decision life mean