Kundera Unbearable Quotes & Sayings

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tereza lives with Tomas, but her love requires mobilization of all her strength, and suddenly she can't go on, she longs to retreat down below, to where she came from. And I ask myself: What is happening with her? And this is the answer I find: She is overcome by vertigo. But what is vertigo? I look for a definition and I say: "A heady, insuperable longing to fall." But immediately I correct myself, I sharpen the definition: Vertigo is "the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down. Vertigo is one of the keys to understanding Tereza — Milan Kundera

In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. — Milan Kundera

A Prayer Found in Chester Cathedral Give me good digestion, Lord, And also something to digest; Give me a healthy body, Lord, With sense to keep it at its best. Give me a healthy mind, good Lord, To keep the good and pure in sight; Which, seeing sin, is not appalled, But finds a way to set it right. Give me a mind that is not bored, That does not whimper, whine or sigh; Don't let me worry overmuch About the fussy thing called 'I'. Give me a sense of humour, Lord, Give me the grace to see a joke; To get some happiness from life, And pass it on to other folk. - Anonymous — John Boyes

Man knows he cannot embrace the universe with all it's sums and stars. But he finds it unbearable to be condemned to lose the second infinity as well, the one so close, so nearly within reach. Tamina lost the infinity of her love, I lost my father, we all lose whatever we do, because if it is perfection we are after, we must go to the heart of the matter, and we can never quite reach it. — Milan Kundera

I'm like the monster that hides under your bed, waiting till the moment your breath evens out, and your eyes close to attack. — J.L. Beck

In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. — Milan Kundera

There is no perfection only life
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being — Milan Kundera

Let the planet be convulsed with exploding bombs. — Milan Kundera

Every one of my novels could be entitled The Unbearable Lightness of Being or The Joke or Laughable Loves; the titles are interchangeable, they reflect the small number of themes that obsess me, define me, and unfortunately, restrict me. Beyond these themes, I have nothing else to say or write. — Milan Kundera

In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. — Milan Kundera

It was vertigo. A heady, insuperable longing to fall. We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down. -Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 76 — Milan Kundera

It is not wrong to be different. Sometimes it is hard, but it is not wrong. — Elizabeth Moon

I want people to say, 'She is really sweet and kind.' Anyone can work hard enough and be 'pretty.' Not many people are nice nowadays. — Amy Weber

The worst mistake you can make with children is to talk to them in a condescending, patronising way and think that you can teach them something. You have to understand that it is you who will be learning from them. You have to get into their world and see things from their perspective. — Magnus Scheving

The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia. — Milan Kundera

I thought of the fate of Descartes' famous formulation: man as 'master and proprietor of nature.' Having brought off miracles in science and technology, this 'master and proprietor' is suddenly realizing that he owns nothing and is master neither of nature (it is vanishing, little by little, from the planet), nor of History (it has escaped him), nor of himself (he is led by the irrational forces of his soul). But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master? The planet is moving through the void without any master. There it is, the unbearable lightness of being. — Milan Kundera

Wit will shine Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line. — John Dryden

If rejection and priviledge are one and the same, if there is no difference between the sublime and the paltry, if Son of God can undergo judgement of shit, then human existence loses its dimensions and becomes unbearable light. — Milan Kundera

FAITH is the element, the "chemical" which, when mixed with prayer, gives one direct communication with Infinite Intelligence. — Napoleon Hill

My heart is very much alive and in your hands. Do your best not to destroy it.
You are very lucky it isn't it my hands ... The only thing I know to do with hearts is incinerate them!
Ouch! — Christine Feehan

If excitement is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement, love is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee the Creator. Love is our freedom. Love lies beyond Es Muss sein! — Milan Kundera

Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. — Milan Kundera

Anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself. — Milan Kundera

Our people get profit-sharing checks. I got a report the other day that says that 84 percent of our people participate in our stock purchase program, where they can buy stock at a 15 percent discount. — David Neeleman

It is no good my telling you. One never believes other people's experiencem and one is only very gradually convinced by one's own. — Vita Sackville-West

No, I don't have any problems leaving disappointments behind. I've had lots of good days at golf and a few disappointments, so you never know what's around the corner. — Lee Westwood

I'm not a bad guy. If only I could stop hoping. If only I could say to my heart: Give up. Be alone forever. There's always opera. There's angel-food cake and neighborhood children caroling, and the look of autumn leaves on a wet roof. But no. My heart's some kind of idiotic fishing bobber. — George Saunders

When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. And Sabina - what had come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. 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. — Milan Kundera

Today we are always as ready to judge as we are to fornicate. — Albert Camus

But people may do great good accidentally, though with evil intentions - conversely people may do great evil though having the best of intentions. — Michael Moorcock

Just as the spectroscope opened up a new astronomy by enabling the astronomer to determine some of the constituents of which distant stars are composed, so the seismograph, recording the unfelt motion of distant earthquakes, enables us to see into the earth and determine its nature with as great a certainty, up to a certain point, as if we could drive a tunnel through it and take samples of the matter passed through. — Richard Dixon Oldham

Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable. — Milan Kundera