"Beauty is a rebellion against time."
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Quote collection
Milan Kundera quotes (page 7 of 21)
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"Only the most naive of questions are truly serious."
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"And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition."
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"There is no perfection only life"
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"As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom."
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"The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order."
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"Love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love."
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"The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he usurped for himself over the cow and the horse."
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"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."
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"God has been kind to dogs in no putting a sense of beauty into their heads."
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"Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought."
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"Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass."
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"Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion."
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"Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress."
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"To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth."
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"No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition."
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"... 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."
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"Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue - perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one."
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"If hatred strikes you, if you get accused, thrown to the lions, you can expect one of two reactions from people who know you: some of them will join in the kill, the others will discreetly pretend to know nothing, hear nothing, so you can go right on seeing them and talking to them. That second category, discreet and tactful, those are your friends. 'Friends' in the modern sense of the term. Listen, Jean-Marc, I've known that forever."
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"Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest."
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