Quotes we LOVE from The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera * But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid? The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it puts us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the mans body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. * We can never know what to want, because living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it to our lives to come. * 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 to stand up to it * For there is nothing heavier than compassion, not even ones own pain weighs down so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes. * Necessity, weight and value are three concepts inextricably bound; only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value. * We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same. * ..trying to express the value of her body in terms of the modesty she accorded it. * But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about? 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. * Necessity knows no magic formulae- they are all left to chance. If love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi’s shoulders. *…it is right to chide a man for being blind to coincidences in his daily life; for he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty. * The dreams were eloquent, but they were also beautiful. That aspect seems to have escaped Freud in his theory of dreams. 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. Our dreams prove that to imagine- to dream about something’s that have not happened- is among mankind’s deepest needs. Herein lies the danger. If dreams were not beautiful, they would quickly be forgotten. * Anyone who’s goal is ‘something higher’ must expect some day to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel is even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the 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. * On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the intelligible truth. * Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country when he has his family, colleagues and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood. * In spite of their love, they had made each others life a hell. The fact that they loved each other was merely proof that the fault lay not in themselves, in their behavior or inconstancy of feeling, but rather in their incompatibility; he was strong and she was weak. * All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit no transgression. * What we have not chosen we cannot consider either our merit or our failure. * Betrayal. From tender youth we are told by father and teacher that betrayal is the most heinous offence imaginable. But what is betrayal? Betrayal means breaking ranks. Betrayal means breaking ranks and going off in to the unknown. I know of nothing more magnificent than going off into the unknown. * Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words. * Seeing is limited by two borders; strong light, which blinds and total darkness. perhaps that is what motivated my distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism is a veiled longing for death. * But the larger a man grows in his own inner darkness, the more his outer form diminishes. A man with closed eyes is wreck of a man. * In the safety of emigration a refuge, they all naturally came out in favor of fighting. * Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. * …always preferred the unreal to the real. * ..because love means renouncing strength. * What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough; it means not lying, no hiding, and not dissimulating. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies. On the other hand, that same division of life into public and private spheres is the source of all lies; a person is one thing in private and something quite different in public. Here, living in truth means breaking down the barriers between the private and the public. * The cemetery was vanity transmogrified into stone. Instead of growing more sensible in death, the inhabitants of the cemetery were sillier than they had been in life. * ..if unearthly love must contain a strong of the inexplicable and incomprehensible, the earthly love rested on true understanding. * The only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naïve of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached, in other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence. * …how she wished she could learn lightness! She yearned for someone to help her out of her anachronistic shell. * Toilets in modern water closets rise up from the floor like white water lilies. The architect does all he can to make the body forget how paltry it is, and to make man ignore what happens to his intestinal wastes after the water from the tank flushes them down the drain. Even though the sewer pipelines reach far into our houses with their tentacles, they are carefully hidden from view, and we are happily ignorant of the invisible Venice of shit underlying our bathrooms, bedrooms, dancehalls and parliaments. * Loves are like empires; when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they too fade away. * …Look long and hard into the waters of the river, because the sight of the flow is soothing and healing. The river flowing from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on. * How could someone who had so little respect for people be so dependent on what they thought of him? Perhaps his deep seated mistrust of people, his doubts as to their rights to decide his destiny and to judge him, had played its part in his choice of profession, a profession that excluded his from public display. A man who chooses to be a politician say, voluntarily makes the public his judge, with the naïve assurance that he will gain its favor. And if the crowd does express its disapproval, it merely goads his to bigger and better things. On the other hand, a doctor is judged only by his patients and immediate colleagues, that is, behind closed doors, man to man. Confronted by the looks of those who judge him, he can respond at once with his own look, to explain or defend himself. * In so far as it is possible to divide people into categories, the surest criterion is the deep- seated desires that orient them to one or another lifelong activity. Every French man is different. But all actors of the world over are similar. An actor is someone who in early childhood consents to exhibit himself for the rest of his life to an anonymous public. Without that basic consent, which has nothing to do with talent, which goes deeper than talent, no one can become an actor. Similarly, a doctor is someone who consents to spend his life involved with human bodies and all that they entail. That basic consent enables him to enter the dissecting room during the first year of medical school and persevere for the requisite number of years. Surgery takes the basic imperative of the medical profession to its outermost border, where the human makes contact with the divine. When a person is clubbed violently on the head, he collapses and stops breathing. Some day, he will stop breathing anyway. Murder simply hastens a bit what god will eventually see to on His own. god, it may be assumed, took murder into account; he did not take surgery into account. He never suspected someone would dare to stick his hand into the mechanism. *Internal imperatives are all the more powerful and therefore all the more of an inducement to revolt. * What is unique about the ‘I’ hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual ‘I’ is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered. * Punishing people who don’t know what they’ve done is barbaric. * Men who pursue a multitude of women fit neatly into two categories, some seek their own subjective and unchanging dream of a woman in all women. Others are prompted by a desire to possess the endless variety of the objective female world. The obsession of the former is lyrical; what they seek in women is themselves, their idea, and since an ideal is by definition something that can never be found, they are disappointed again and again. The disappointment that propels them from woman to woman gives their inconsistency a kind of romantic excuse, so that many sentimental woman are touched by their unbridled philandering. The obsession of the latter is epic, and women see nothing the least bit touching in it; the man projects no subjective ideal on women, and since everything interests him, nothing can disappoint him. This inability to be disappointed has something scandalous about it. the obsession of the epic womanizer strikes people as lacking in redemption(redemption by disappointment.) * Myth from platos 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. * Rejection and privilege, happiness and woe, how short the step from one pole of human existence to the other. Vertiginously close? Can proximity cause vertigo? If rejection and privilege are one and the same, if there is no difference between the sublime and the paltry, then human existence loses its dimensions and becomes unbearably light. * 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 first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public. The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. They are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. They are happier than the people in the first category, who, when they lose their public, have the feeling that the lights have gone out in the room of their lives. This happens to nearly all of them sooner or later. People in the second category, on the other hand, can always come up with eyes they need. Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. Their situation is as dangerous as the people in the first category. One day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will go dark. And finally there is the forth category, the rarest; the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers. * Inscription on a grave; A RETURN AFTER LONG WANDERINGS. * Therein lies the whole of mans plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy; happiness is the longing for repetition. * The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Ofcourse, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures, what seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and horse. * We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions-love, antipathy, 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. * …the questions that plague human couples; does he love me? Does he love anyone more than me? Does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all the questions we ask for love, to measure. Test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company. * Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia.
Posted on: Sun, 13 Apr 2014 08:26:18 +0000
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