"Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity."
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Quote collection
Milan Kundera quotes (page 14 of 21)
410 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become"
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"Modern stupidity means not ignorance but the nonthought of received ideas"
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"I am not in favor of imposing happiness on people. Everyone has a right to his bad wine, to his stupidity, and to his dirty fingernails."
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"Jealousy has the amazing power to illuminate a single person in an intense beam of light, keeping the multitude of others in total darkness."
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"...people don't respect the morning. An alarm clock violently wakes them up, shatters their sleep like the blow of an ax, and they immediately surrender themselves to deadly haste. Can you tell me what kind of day can follow a beginning of such violence? What happens to people whose alarm clock daily gives them a small electric shock? Each day they become more used to violence and less used to pleasure."
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"To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn't even know how to be dead."
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"The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history."
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"No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad."
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"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."
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"A constant interrogation."
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"I have no mission. No one has."
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"He was well aware that of the two of three thousand times he had made love (how many times had he made love in his life?) only two or three were really essential and unforgettable. The rest were mere echoes, imitations, repetitions, or reminiscences."
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"All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit of no transgression."
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"given the nature of the human couple, the love of a man and a woman is a priori inferior to that which can exist (at least in the best instances) in the love between man and dog...It is a completely selfless love."
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"The eye... the point where a person's identity is concentrated."
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"Because beyond their practical function, all gestures have a meaning that exceeds the intention of those who make them; when people in bathing suits fling themselves into the water, it is joy itself that shows in the gesture, notwithstanding any sadness the divers may actually feel. When someone jumps into the water fully clothed, it is another thing entirely: the only person who jumps into the water fully clothed is a person trying to drown; and a person trying to drown does not dive headfirst; he lets himself fall: thus speaks the immemorial language of gestures."
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"The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on."
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"Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being."
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"Love is a battle, and I plan to go on fighting. To the end."
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