Милан Кундера цитаты

страница 6

„Мы испытываем стыд не потому, что совершаем ошибки, а потому, что наше унижение видят все.“

„Нет чувства одиночества или даже плохого самочувствия. Только его место в порядке делает их хорошими или плохими.“

„Счастье - жажда повторения.“

„Человек - это всего лишь то, что являет собой его образ.“

„Нет ничего труднее, чем заставить понять юмор.“

“But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science, instantly fades away.”

“What we have not chosen we cannot consider either our merit or our failure… To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.”

“Jealousy has the amazing power to illuminate a single person in an intense beam of light, keeping the multitude of others in total darkness.”

“The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen”

“Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.”

“Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?”

“No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development.”

“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.”

“People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.”

“He suddenly recalled the famous myth from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”

“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.”

“Aren't we living in a world where heedless men only desire decapitated women?”

“I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30)”

“No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”

“But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.”

“The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.”

“She said: "I get scared when my eye blinks. Scared that during that second when my gaze is switched off, a snake or a rat or another man could slip into your place."”

“This is the real and the only reason for friendship: to provide a mirror so the other person can contemplate his image from the past, which, without the eternal blah-blah of memories between pals, would long ago have disappeared.”

“Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.”

“Necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.”

“No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad.”

“Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.”

“Since the insignificance of all things is our lot, we should not bear it as an affliction but learn to enjoy it.”

“Love is a battle," said Marie-Claude, still smiling. "And I plan to go on fighting. To the end.”

“We can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse.”

“He had spent seven years of his life with Tereza, and now he realised that those years were more attractive in retrospect than they were when he was living them.”

“Sabina’s initial inner revolt against Communism was aesthetic rather than ethical in character. What repelled her was not nearly so much the ugliness of the Communist world (ruined castles transformed into cow sheds) as the mask of beauty it tried to wear — in other words, Communist kitsch.”

“The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful.”

“To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.”