There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos. Milan Kundera More Quotes by Milan Kundera More Quotes From Milan Kundera Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colourful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles... no matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, even in Hitler's time, even in Stalin's time. Milan Kundera garden flower tombstone No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition. Milan Kundera kitsch human-condition matter Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all. Milan Kundera unbearable-lightness-of-being might life No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches. Milan Kundera rust movement world She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: We are at the last station. The happiness meant: We are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness. Milan Kundera sadness space together Oh 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 bed forever ... characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about. Milan Kundera character people thinking We are born one time only, we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we've gained from the previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is, we marry without knowing what it is to be married, and even when we enter old age, we don't know what it is we're heading for: the old are innocent children innocent of thier old age. In that sense, man's world is the planet of inexperience. Milan Kundera knowing men children The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas. Milan Kundera serious-subjects form drama Tell me, where in life is there a value that would make us consider suicide uncalled for on principle! Love? Or friendship? I guarantee that friendship is not a bit less fickle than love and it is impossible to build anything on it. Self-love? I wish it were possible. Milan Kundera guarantees-that suicide self I want you to be weak. As weak as I am. Milan Kundera i-want-you weak want Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. Milan Kundera questions-and-answers serious children Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously. Milan Kundera sad-life gentleman men There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize. Milan Kundera metaphysical problem philosophy Since the insignificance of all things is our lot, we should not bear it as an affliction but learn to enjoy it. Milan Kundera affliction should bears Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Milan Kundera unbearable tests cutting Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being. Milan Kundera fragments existence reason The difference between the university graduate and the autodidact lies not so much in the extent of knowledge as in the extent of vitality and self-confidence. Milan Kundera self-confidence differences lying Only the basic situations in life occur only once, never to return. For a man to be a man, he must be fully aware of this never-to-return. (p.148) Milan Kundera situations-in-life return men In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the novels. She had read any number of them, from Fielding to Thomas Mann. They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane from the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others. Milan Kundera eye numbers book
