Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.
— Milan Kundera
Sensitive Unbearable Lightness Of Being quotations
Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness.
What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.
Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).
When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm.
It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.
loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.
We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under . . . The fourth category, the rarest, is the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.
In the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.
Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death.
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 ... Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.
The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.
On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.
Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
Chance and chance alone has a message for us.
Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.
Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo.
She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then.
The sadness meant: We are at the last station. The happiness meant: We are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.
Yes, if you're looking for infinity, just close your eyes!
But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.
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.
Necessity knows no magic formulae-they are all left to chance.
If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders.
Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor
Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch.
Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.
Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.
Like it or not, i was already learning that in the worst and darkest time, I would find specks of light, moments of joy. What I didn't want to learn was the other, harsher lesson - that in life's brightest moments there would also be unbearable pain. p 87
Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with.
no one who has seen an angel ever mistakes it for a ghost.
Angels are remarkable for their warmth and light, and all who see them speak in awe of their irridescent and refulgent light, of brilliant colors, or else of the unbearable whiteness of their being. You are flooded with laughter, happiness.
We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.
Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
People are always shouting they want to create a better future.
It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone.
Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.
The senator had only one argument in his favour: his feeling.
When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.
Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous.
Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.