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"The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It's unintentional. It arose independent of human design, like a stalagmitic cavern. Forms which are in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with a sudden wondrous poetry."
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"A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one."
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Personal Development
"Cities must be fun."
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Personal Development
"I was eleven, then I was sixteen. Though no honors came my way, those were the lovely years."
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Personal Development
"Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It's unintentional. It arose independent of human design, like a stalagmitic cavern. Forms which are in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with a sudden wondrous poetry."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins."
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Personal Development
"Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem. In fact, a city is nothing more than a solution to a problem, that in turn creates more problems that need more solutions, until towers rise, roads widen, bridges are built, and millions of people are caught up in a mad race to feed the problem-solving, problem-creating frenzy."
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Personal Development
"Any plan of administration which contemplates a concentrating of responsibility is open to the dangers which follow the creation of a bureaucracy."
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Personal Development
Explore more quotes by Milan Kundera
"The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness."
Happiness
"There is no particular merit in being nice to one's fellow man... We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is a result of our emotions — love, apathy, charity, or malice — and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals. True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect, mankind has suffered a fundamental débâcle — a débâcle so fundamental all others stem from it."
Morality
"It takes a very great intelligence to breathe logical meaning into meaningless ideas."
Philosophy
"She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with walls and become a house she can live in. Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death."
Memory
"The physical contact with people who struck and trampled and killed one another seemed far worse to him than a solitary death in the purity of the waters."
Death
"It was the incommunicable scent of this country, its intangible essence, that she had brought along with her to France."
Memory
"People who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all."
Perception
"Horror is a shock, a time of utter blindness. Horror lacks every hint of beauty. All we can see is the piercing light of an unknown event awaiting us. Sadness, on the other hand, assumes we are in the know... The light of horror thus lost its harshness, and the world was bathed in a gentle, bluish light that actually beautified it."
Emotion
"The termites of reduction have always gnawed away at life: even the greatest love ends up as a skeleton of feeble memories."
Love
"A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea."
Creativity
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