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"Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one's painful self through the world.But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain."
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"He had learned that, as there is no situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, so there is no situation in which he can be perfectly unhappy and unfree."
"Their pleasures are fierce and their sleep impenetrable. And they know that the body has a soul in which the soul has no part."
"You call forth the world which God has formed and that world only. Nor is this life of yours by which you set such store your doing, however you may choose to tell it. Its shape was forced in the void at the onset and all talk of what might otherwise have been is senseless for there is no otherwise. Of what could it be made? Where be hid? Or how make its appearance? The probability fo the actual is absolute. That we have no power to guess it out beforehand makes it no less certain. That we may imagine alternate histories means nothing at all."
"Existentialism's first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him."
"To live was to be a fragment of the cosmere that was experiencing itself."
Explore more quotes by Milan Kundera
"When his wife was at his side, she was also in front of him, marking out the horizon of his life. Now the horizon is empty: the view has changed."
"Her weakness was aggressive and kept forcing him to capitulate until eventually he lost his strength and was transformed into the rabbit in her arms ."
"How would I explain to him that I couldn't make peace with him? How would I explain that if I did I would immediately lose my inner balance? How would I explain that one of the arms of my internal scales would suddenly shoot upward? How would I explain that my hatred of him counterbalanced the weight of evil that had fallen on my youth? How would I explain that he embodied all the evils in my life? How would I explain to him that I needed to hate him?"
"Dogs are our link to Paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. 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."
"The situation is very slightly solemn and thus embarrassing, as are all such situations when after the initial lovemaking, the lovers confront a future they are suddenly required to take on."
"Do stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live compromise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery. Is it an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can't rid myself of the need continually to decipher my own life."
"I understand you, and I shall not attempt to make you change your mind. I am too old to want to improve the world. I have told you what I think, and that is all. I shall remain your friend even if you act contrary to my convictions, and I shall help you even if I disagree with you."
"The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead."
"For a trial is initiated not to render justice but to annihilate the defendant.Even when the trial is of dead people, the point is to kill them off a second time: by burning their books; by removing their names from the schoolbooks; by demolishing their monuments; by rechristening the streets that bore their names."
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