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Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera (IPA: [emelan ekundera]) (born April 1, 1929, in Brno, Czechoslovakia) is a Czech and French writer of Czech origin who has lived in exile in France since 1975, where he became a naturalized citizen in 1981. He is best known as the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Joke.

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The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.

– Milan Kundera

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When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.

– Milan Kundera

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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 debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.

– Milan Kundera

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All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

– Milan Kundera

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Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo Fear of falling No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

– Milan Kundera

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High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor, only to be surpassed by his successor. Without this relay race called history there would be no European art and what characterizes it: a longing for originality, a longing for change. Robespierre, Napoleon, Beethoven, Stalin, Picasso, they're all runners in the relay race, they all belong to the same stadium.

– Milan Kundera

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I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.

– Milan Kundera

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Laughing deeply is living deeply.

– Milan Kundera

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Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

– Milan Kundera

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The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.

– Milan Kundera

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The word change, so dear to our Europe, has been given a new meaning: it no longer means a new stage of coherent development (as it was understood by Vico, Hegel or Marx), but a shift from one side to another, from front to back, from the back to the left, from the left to the front (as understood by designers dreaming up the fashion for the next season).

– Milan Kundera

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We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.

– Milan Kundera

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Woman is the future of man. That means that the world which was once formed in man's image will now be transformed to the image of woman. The more technical and mechanical, cold and metallic it becomes, the more it will need the kind of warmth that only the woman can give it. If we want to save the world, we must adapt to the woman, let ourselves be led by the woman, let ourselves be penetrated by the Ewigweiblich, the eternally feminine!

– Milan Kundera

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Milan Kundera

The Unbearable Lightness of Being
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