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No Act Is Of Itself Either Good Or Bad. Only Its Place In The Order Of Things Makes It Good Or Bad.
-Milan Kundera
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No Act Is Of

Milan Kundera
...
No Act Is Of Itself Either Good Or Bad. Only Its Place In The Order Of Things Makes It Good Or Bad.

Understanding the Quote: "no act is of itself either good or bad. only its place..."

This quote by Milan Kundera reflects deeply on the theme of order. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Order, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Milan Kundera interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera is celebrated for insightful thoughts on order and motivation. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

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Order
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In The Love Poetry Of Every Age, The Woman Longs To Be Weighed Down By The Man's Body.
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In Irena’s Head The Alcohol Plays A Double Role: It Frees Her Fantasy, Encourages Her Boldness, Makes Her Sensual, And At The Same Time It Dims Her Memory. She Makes Love Wildly, Lasciviously, And At The Same Time The Curtain Of Oblivion Wraps Her Lewdness In An All-concealing Darkness. As If A Poet Were Writing His Greatest Poem With Ink That Instantly Disappears.
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The Border Between Good And Evil Is Terribly Fuzzy.
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Youth Is Terrible: It Is A Stage Trod By Children In Buskins And A Variety Of Costumes Mouthing Speeches They've Memorized And Fanatically Believe But Only Half Understand. And History Is Terrible Because It So Often Ends Up A Playground For The Immature; A Playground For The Young Nero, A Playground For The Young Bonaparte, A Playground For The Easily Roused Mobs Of Children Whose Simulated Passions And Simplistic Poses Suddenly Metamorphose Into A Catastrophically Real Reality.
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Only Animals Were Not Expelled From Paradise.
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Fortunately Women Have The Miraculous Ability To Change The Meaning Of Their Actions After The Event.
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...in Our Time Art Is Encrusted With A Noisy, Opaque, Logorrhea Of Theory That Prevents A Work From Coming Into Direct, Media Free, Non-interpreted Contact With Its Viewer (its Reader, Its Listener)
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...[p]eople Who Shout Joy From The Rooftops Are Often The Saddest Of All... (p.24)
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The Difference Between The University Graduate And The Autodidact Lies Not So Much In The Extent Of Knowledge As In The Extent Of Vitality And Self-confidence.
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Only A Literary Work That Reveals An Unknown Fragment Of Human Existence Has A Reason For Being.
Reason
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He Was No Longer Quite Sure Whether Anything He Had Ever Thought Or Felt Was Truly His Own Property, Or Whether His Thoughts Were Merely A Common Part Of The World’s Store Of Ideas Which Had Always Existed Ready-made And Which People Only Borrowed, Like Books From A Library.
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Forgive Me," He Went On. "for A Long Time I Have Had The Peculiar Habit Of Not Arriving But Appearing.
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Beauty Is A Rebellion Against Time.
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The Combination Of A Frivolous Form And A Serious Subject Immediately Unmasks The Truth About Our Dramas.
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Optimism Is The Opium Of The People.
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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.
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La Memoria No Guarda Películas, Guarda Fotografías.
If Hatred Strikes You, If You Get Accused, Thrown To The Lions, You Can Expect One Of Two Reactions From People Who Know You: Some Of Them Will Join In The Kill, The Others Will Discreetly Pretend To Know Nothing, Hear Nothing, So You Can Go Right On Seeing Them And Talking To Them. That Second Category, Discreet And Tactful, Those Are Your Friends. 'friends' In The Modern Sense Of The Term. Listen, Jean-marc, I've Known That Forever.
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All Lovers Unconsciously Establish Their Own Rules Of The Game, Which From The Outset Admit Of No Transgression.
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For A Novelist, A Given Historic Situation Is An Anthropologic Laboratory In Which He Explores His Basic Question: What Is Human Existence?
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The Stupidity Of People Comes From Having An Answer For Everything. The Wisdom Of The Novel Comes From Having A Question For Everything.
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Love Is A Continual Interrogation. I Don’t Know Of A Better Definition Of Love.
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The Psychological And Physiological Mechanism Of Love Is So Complex That At A Certain Period In His Life A Young Man Must Concentrate All His Energy On Coming To Grips With It, And In This Way He Misses The Actual Content Of The Love: The Woman He Loves. (in This He Is Much Like A Young Violinist Who Cannot Concentrate On The Emotional Content Of A Piece Until The Technique Required To Play It Comes Automatically.)
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But Was It Love? The Feeling Of Wanting To Die Beside Her Was Clearly Exaggerated: He Had Seen Her Only Once Before In His Life! Was It Simply The Hysteria Of A Man, Who, Aware Deep Down Of His Inaptitude For Love, Felt The Self-deluding Need To Simulate It?
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Remembering Our Past, Carrying It Around With Us Always, May Be The Necessary Requirement For Maintaining, As They Say, The Wholeness Of The Self. To Ensure That The Self Doesn’t Shrink, To See That It Holds On To Its Volume, Memories Have To Be Watered Like Potted Flowers, And The Watering Calls For Regular Contact With The Witnesses Of The Past, That Is To Say, With Friends. They Are Our Mirror; Our Memory; We Ask Nothing Of Them But That They Polish The Mirror From Time To Time So We Can Look At Ourselves In It.
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Tell Me, Where In Life Is There A Value That Would Make Us Consider Suicide Uncalled For On Principle! Love? Or Friendship? I Guarantee That Friendship Is Not A Bit Less Fickle Than Love And It Is Impossible To Build Anything On It. Self-love? I Wish It Were Possible.
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The Best Actors Do Not Let The Wheels Show.
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War And Culture, Those Are The Two Poles Of Europe, Her Heaven And Hell, Her Glory And Shame, And They Cannot Be Separated From One Another. When One Comes To An End, The Other Will End Also And One Cannot End Without The Other. The Fact That No War Has Broken Out In Europe For Fifty Years Is Connected In Some Mysterious Way With The Fact That For Fifty Years No New Picasso Has Appeared Either.
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[kafka] Transformed The Profoundly Antipoetic Material Of A Highly Bureaucratized Society Into The Great Poetry Of The Novel; He Transformed A Very Ordinary Story Of A Man Who Cannot Obtain A Promised Job . . . Into Myth, Into Epic, Into A Kind Of Beauty Never Before Seen.
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The Moment Kafka Attracts More Attenetion Than Joseph K., Kafka's Posthumous Death Begins.
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I Want You To Be Weak. As Weak As I Am.
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Once Her Love Had Been Publicized, It Would Gain Weight, Become A Burden.
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For The Body Is Temporal And Thought Is Eternal And The Shimmering Essence Of Flame Is An Image Of Thought.
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Those Boobs Of Yours Are Ubiquitous - Like God!
Art Arises From Sources Other Than Logic." (p.32)
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Logic
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Perhaps If They Had Stayed Together Longer, Sabina And Franz Would Have Begun To Understand The Words They Used. Gradually, Timorously, Their Vocabularies Would Have Come Together, Like Bashful Lovers, And The Music Of One Would Have Begun To Intersect With The Music Of The Other. But It Was Too Late Now.
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For He Was Aware Of The Great Secret Of Life: Women Don't Look For Handsome Men. Women Look For Men Who Have Had Beautiful Women. Having An Ugly Mistress Is Therefore A Fatal Mistake.
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Degrees
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Order
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Two
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Funny
Humorous
Inspiration
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Noise
Advantage
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Attitude
Men
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Love Is
Desire
Half
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Suffering
Unbearable
Immortality No Longer Interests The Weary Old Man At All.
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Law
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Giving
Emotion
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Race
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Laughter
Joy
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Political
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Novel
Great Novels
The Present Era Grabs Everything That Was Ever Written In Order To Transform It Into Films, Tv Programs; Or Cartoons. What Is Essential In A Novel Is Precisely What Can Only Be Expressed In A Novel, And So Every Adaptation Contains Nothing But The Non-essential. If A Person Is Still Crazy Enough To Write Novels Nowadays And Wants To Protect Them, He Has To Write Them In Such A Way That They Cannot Be Adapted, In Other Words, In Such A Way That They Cannot Be Retold.
Crazy
Book
Writing
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.
Sadness
Space
Together
Yes, The Essence Of Every Love Is A Child, And It Makes No Difference At All Whether It Has Ever Actually Been Conceived Or Born. In The Algebra Of Love A Child Is The Symbol Of The Magical Sum Of Two Beings.
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Essence
So She Stood Naked In Front Of The Young Man And At This Moment Stopped Playing The Game.
Men
Games
Naked
Children, Never Look Back!" And This Meant That We Must Never Allow The Future To Be Weighed Down By Memory . For Children Have No Past, And That Is The Whole Secret Of The Magical Innocence Of Their Smiles.
Memories
Children
Past
Such Are The Splendors And Miseries Of Memory: It Is Proud Of Its Ability To Keep Truthful Track Of The Logical Sequence Of Past Events; But When It Comes To How We Experienced Them At The Time, Memory Feels No Obligation To Truth.
Memories
Past
Track
There Is No Means Of Testing Which Decision Is Better, Because There Is No Basis For Comparison. We Live Everything As It Comes, Without Warning, Like An Actor Going On Cold. And What Can Life Be Worth If The First Rehearsal For Life Is Life Itself? That Is Why Life Is Always Like A Sketch. No, "sketch" Is Not Quite A Word, Because A Sketch Is An Outline Of Something, The Groundwork For A Picture, Whereas The Sketch That Is Our Life Is A Sketch For Nothing, An Outline With No Picture.
Life
Mean
Decision
Her Kitsch Was The Image Of Home, All Peace, Quiet, And Harmony, And Ruled By A Loving Mother And A Wise Father. It Was An Image That Took Shape In Her After The Death Of Her Parents. The Less Her Life Resembled The Sweetest Of Dreams, The More Sensitive She Was To Its Magic, And More Than Once She Shed Tears When The Ungrateful Daughter In A Sentimental Film Embraced The Neglected Father As The Windows Of The Happy Family's House Shone Out Into The Dying Day.
Wise
Mother
Dream
A Constant Interrogation.
Love
Constant
Interrogation
Every Love Relationship Rests On An Unwritten Agreement Unthinkingly Concluded By The Lovers In The First Weeks Of Their Love. They Are Still In A Kind Of Dream But At The Same Time, Without Knowing It, Are Drawing Up, Like Uncompromising Lawyers, The Detailed Clauses Of Their Contract. O Lovers! Be Careful In Those Dangerous First Days! Once You've Brought Breakfast In Bed You'll Have To Bring It Forever, Unless You Want To Be Accused Of Lovelessness And Betrayal.
Dream
Betrayal
Drawing
My Lifelong Ambition Has Been To Unite The Utmost Seriousness Of Question With The Utmost Lightness Of Form.
Ambition
Form
Lifelong
[w]e Must Never Allow The Future To Collapse Under The Burden Of Memory.
Memories
Burden
Collapse
Common European Thought Is The Fruit Of The Immense Toil Of Translators. Without Translators, Europe Would Not Exist; Translators Are More Important Than Members Of The European Parliament.
Europe
Important
Toil
Only After A While Did It Occur To Me (in Spite Of The Chilly Silence Which Surrounded Me) That My Story Was Not Of The Tragic Sort, But Rather Of The Comic Variety. At Any Rate That Afforded Me Some Comfort.
Silence
Comfort
Stories
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; We Feel That Beethoven Himself, Gloomy And Awe-inspiring, Is Playing The “es Muss Sein!” To Our Own Great Love.
Love Is
Light
Hands
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Beautiful
Two
People
The Novel Is Not The Author's Confession; It Is An Investigation Of Human Life In The Trap The World Has Become
Life
People
World
Without The Meditative Background That Is Criticism, Works Become Isolated Gestures, Historical Accidents, Soon Forgotten.
Historical
Criticism
Gestures
From The Top Of The Staircase She Sees The London Train, Modern And Elegant, And She Tells Herself Again: Whether It's Good Luck Or Bad To Be Born Onto This Earth, The Best Way To Spend A Life Here Is To Let Yourself Be Carried Along, As I Am Moving At This Moment, By A Cheerful, Noisy Crowd Moving Forward.
Moving
Good Luck
Cheerful
The History Of Music Is Mortal, But The Idiocy Of The Guitar Is Eternal.
Music
Guitar
Idiocy
When Graves Are Covered With Stones, The Dead Can No Longer Get Out. But The Dead Can't Go Out Anyway! What Difference Does It Make Whether They're Covered With Soil Or Stones?
Differences
Doe
Stones
Let Us Consider The Critic, Therefore, As A Discoverer Of Discoveries.
Discovery
Criticism
Critics
Eroticism Is Like A Dance: One Always Leads The Other.
Inspirational
Dance
Dancing
Today We're All Alike, All Of Us Bound Together By Our Shared Apathy Toward Work. That Very Apathy Has Become A Passion. The One Great Collective Passion Of Our Time.
Passion
Together
Apathy
Sad Company Is Bad Company.
Bad Company
Company
To Be A Writer Does Not Mean To Preach A Truth, It Means To Discover A Truth.
Writing
Mean
Doe
Man Can Only Be Certain About The Present Moment. But Is That Quite True Either? Can He Really Know The Present? Is He In A Position To Make Any Judgment About It? Certainly Not. For How Can A Person With No Knowledge Of The Future Understand The Meaning Of The Present? If We Do Not Know What Future The Present Is Leading Us Toward, How Can We Say Whether This Present Is Good Or Bad, Whether It Deserves Our Concurrence, Or Our Suspicion, Or Our Hatred?
Men
Hatred
Certain
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.
Drama
Unbearable
Burden
Physical Love Is Unthinkable Without Violence.
Relationship
Love Is
Violence
But Then He Told Himself: What Does It Really Mean To Be Useful? Today's World, Just As It Is, Contains The Sum Of The Utility Of All People Of All Times. Which Implies: The Highest Morality Consists In Being Useless.
Mean
People
Doe
Indeed, The Only Truly Serious Questions Are Ones That Even A Child Can Formulate. Only The Most Naive 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 Limit Of Human Possibilities, Describe The Boundaries Of Human Existence.
Children
Questions And Answers
Limits
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).
Change
Dream
Fashion
In The World Of Highways, A Beautiful Landscape Means: An Island Of Beauty Connected By A Long Line With Other Islands Of Beauty.
Beauty
Beautiful
Mean
If We Cannot Accept The Importance Of The World, Which Considers Itself Important, If In The Midst Of That World Our Laughter Finds No Echo, We Have But One Choice: To Take The World As A Whole And Make It The Object Of Our Game; To Turn It Into A Toy
Laughter
Echoes
Games
Man Reckons With Immortality, And Forgets To Reckon With Death.
Men
Forget
Immortality
Hate Traps Us By Binding Us Too Tightly To Our Adversary.
Hate
Human Nature
Traps
What Does It Mean To Live In Truth? Putting It Negatively Is Easy Enough: It Means Not Lying, Not Hiding, And Not Dissimulating.
Lying
Mean
Doe
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.
Giving
Unbearable
Birth
Modern Stupidity Means Not Ignorance But The Nonthought Of Received Ideas
Mean
Ignorance
Ideas
The Very Beginning Of Genesis Tells Us That God Created Man In Order To Give Him Dominion Over Fish And Fowl And All Creatures. Of Course, Genesis Was Written By A Man, Not A Horse.
Horse
Men
Order
Laughing Deeply Is Living Deeply.
Happiness
Laughing
I Remember That The Day I Finished 'the Angels,' Part Three Of 'the Book Of Laughter And Forgetting', I Was Terribly Proud Of Myself. I Was Sure That I Had Discovered The Key To A New Way Of Putting Together A Narrative.
Laughter
Book
Angel
Love Is The Longing For The Half Of Ourselves We Have Lost.
Love Is
Half
Unbearable
Those Who Consider The Devil To Be A Partisan Of Evil And Angels To Be Warriors For Good Accept The Demagogy Of The Angels. Things Are Clearly More Complicated.
Spiritual
Angel
Warrior
Mankind's Real Moral Test, A Test So Radical And So Deep That It Escapes Our Gaze, Is Probably The One Of Its Relations With Those That Are The Most At Its Mercy; The Animals.
Real
Animal
Tests
Nothing Is More Repugnant To Me Than Brotherly Feelings Grounded In The Common Baseness People See In One Another.
People
Feelings
Common
To Be Mortal Is The Most Basic Human Experience, And Yet Man Has Never Been Able To Accept It, Grasp It, And Behave Accordingly. Man Doesn't Know How To Be Mortal. And When He Dies, He Doesn't Even Know How To Be Dead.
Men
Able
Accepting
Once The Writer In Every Individual Comes To Life (and That Time Is Not Far Off), We Are In For An Age Of Universal Deafness And Lack Of Understanding.
Life
Understanding
Age
We Go Through The Present Blindfolded... Only Later, When The Blindfold Is Removed And We Examine The Past, Do We Realize What We've Been Through And Understand What It Means.
Mean
Past
Realizing
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.
Soul
Unity
Age
The Heaviest Of Burdens Is Simultaneously An Image Of Life's Most Intense Fullfillment. The Heavier The Burden, The Closer Our Lives Come To The Earth, The More Real And Truthful They Become. Conversely, The Absolute Absence Of A Burden Causes Man To Be Lighter Than Air, To Soar Into New Heights, Take Leave Of The Earth And His Earthly Being, And Become Only Half Real, His Movements As Free As They Are Insignificant. What Then Shall We Choose? Weight Or Lightness?
Real
Men
Air
And There Lies The Horror: The Past We Remember Is Devoid Of Time. Impossible To Reexperience A Love The Way We Reread A Book Or Resee A Film.
Lying
Book
Past
Isn't Beer The Holy Libation Of Sincerity? The Potion That Dispels All Hypocrisy, Any Charade Of Fine Manners? The Drink That Does Nothing Worse Than Incite Its Fans To Urinate In All Innocence, To Gain Weight In All Frankness?
Funny
Beer
Hypocrisy
Without Realizing It, The Individual Composes His Life According To The Laws Of Beauty Even In Times Of Greatest Distress.
Courage
Law
Coincidence In Life
Which Doesn't Mean, Of Course, That I'd Stopped Loving Her, That I'd Forgotten Her, Or That Her Image Had Paled; On The Contrary; In The Form Of A Quiet Nostalgia She Remained Constantly Within Me; I Longed For Her As One Longs For Something Definitively Lost.
Mean
Nostalgia
Quiet
For Everyone Is Pained By The Thought Of Disappearing, Unheard And Unseen, Into An Indifferent Universe, And Because Of That Everyone Wants, While There Is Still Time, To Turn Himself Into A Universe Of Words.
Unseen
Want
Disappear
Totalitarianism Is Neither Left Nor Right, And Within Its Empire Both Will Perish. I Was Never A Believer, But After Seeing Czech Catholics Persecuted During The Stalinist Terror, I Felt The Deepest Solidarity With Them. What Separated Us, The Belief In God, Was Secondary To What United Us. In Prague, They Hanged The Socialists And The Priests. Thus A Fraternity Of The Hanged Was Born.
Catholic
Prague
Empires
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.
Purpose
Dazzle
Unbearable
She Is Sadder And Sadder, And For A Man There Is No Balm More Soothing Than The Sadness He Has Caused A Woman.
Sadness
Men
Soothing
I Have A Strong Will To Love You For Eternity.
Love
Strong
Eternity
Our Dreams Prove That To Imagine - To Dream About Things That Have Not Happened - Is Among Mankind's Deepest Needs.
Dream
Needs
Imagine
A Novel That Does Not Uncover A Hitherto Unknown Segment Of Existence Is Immoral. Knowledge Is The Novel's Only Morality.
Doe
Ethics
Morality
At The End Of True Love Is Death, And Only The Love That Ends In Death Is Love.
Love Is
Ends
True Love Is
No Act Is Of Itself Either Good Or Bad. Only Its Place In The Order Of Things Makes It Good Or Bad.
Order
Biographers Know Nothing About The Intimate Sex Lives Of Their Own Wives, But They Think They Know All About Stendhal's Or Faulkner's.
Marriage
Sex
Thinking
The Reason Is That Everyone Has Trouble Accepting The Fact That He Will Disappear Unheard Of And Unnoticed In An Indifferent Universe, And Everyone Wants To Make Himself Into A Universe Of Words Before It's Too Late. Once The Writer In Every Individual Comes To Life (and That Time Is Not Far Off), We Are In For An Age Of Universal Deafness And Lack Of Understanding.
Understanding
Age
Too Late
The Worth Of A Human Being Lies In The Ability To Extend Oneself, To Go Outside Oneself, To Exist In And For Other People.
Lying
People
Ability
When The Heart Speaks, The Mind Finds It Indecent To Object.
Inspirational
Heart
Mind
Radio... Force-feeds Us Music... Everywhere And All The Time... Sewage-water Music In Which Music Is Dying.
Water
Dying
Radio
He Took Over Anger To Intimidate Subordinates, And In Time Anger Took Over Him.
Anger
Conflict
Intimidating
Draw A Line; Draw A Line That Pleases You. And Remember That It Is Not The Artist's Role To Copy The Outlines Of Things But To Create A World Of His Own Lines On Paper." (pp.28-29)
Artist
Roles
World
The Struggle Of Man Against Power Is The Struggle Of Memory Against Forgetting.
Strength
Memories
Struggle
The Longing For Paradise Is Man's Longing Not To Be Man.
Men
Paradise
Longing
The Stupidity Of People Comes From Having An Answer For Everything. The Wisdom Of The Novel Comes From Having A Question For Everything. The Novelist Teaches The Reader To Comprehend The World As A Question. There Is Wisdom And Tolerance In That Attitude. In A World Built On Sacrosanct Certainties The Novel Is Dead.
Attitude
People
Stupidity
Kitsch Excludes Everything From Its Purview Which Is Essentially Unacceptable In Human Existence.
Kitsch
Unbearable Lightness Of Being
Existence
Attaching Love To Sex Is One Of The Most Bizarre Ideas The Creator Ever Had.
Sex
Ideas
Bizarre
...she Merely Wished To Find A Way Out Of The Maze. She Knew That She Had Become A Burden To Him: She Took Things Too Seriously, Turning Everything Into A Tragedy, And Failed To Grasp The Lightness And Amusing Insignificance Of Physical Love. How She Wished She Could Learn Lightness! She Yearned For Someone To Help Her Out Of Her Anachronistic Shell.
Tragedy
Mazes
Shells
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.
Unique
People
Able
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.
Fall
Men
Squares
Disgust At Having To Talk About Oneself Is What Distinguishes Novelistic Talent From Lyric Talent.
Talent
Disgusting
Oneself
The Characters In My Novels Are My Own Unrealized Possibilities. That Is Why I Am Equally Fond Of Them All And Equally Horrified By Them. Each One Has Crossed A Border That I Myself Have Circumvented. It Is That Crossed Border (the Border Beyond Which My Own "i" Ends) Which Attracts Me Most. For Beyond That Border Begins The Secret The Novel Asks About. This Novel Is Not The Author's Confession; It Is An Investigation Of Human Life In The Trap The World Has Become.
Courage
Character
Discovery
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!
War
Mean
Men
The Great European Novel Started Out As Entertainment, And Every True Novelist Is Nostalgic For It. In Fact, The Themes Of Those Great Entertainments Are Terribly Serious-think Of Cervantes!
Thinking
Novelists
Facts
Seeing Is Limited By Two Borders: Strong Light, Which Blinds, And Total Darkness.
Strong
Two
Light
A Mismatched Outfit, A Slightly Defective Denture, An Exquisite Mediocrity Of The Soul-those Are The Details That Make A Woman Real, Alive. The Women You See On Posters Or In Fashion Magazines-the Ones All The Women Try To Imitate Nowadays-how Can They Be Attractive? They Have No Reality Of Their Own; They're Just The Sum Of A Set Of Abstract Rules. They Aren't Born Of Human Bodies; They Hatch Ready-made From The Computers." ~the Book Of Laughter And Forgetting
Beauty
Fashion
Laughter
Great Novels Are Always A Little More Intelligent Than Their Authors.
Intelligent
Littles
Novel
At A Time When History Made Its Way Slowly, The Few Events Were Easily Remembered And Woven Into A Backdrop, Known To Everyone, Before Which Private Life Unfolded The Gripping Show Of Its Adventures. Nowadays, Time Moves Forward At A Rapid Pace. Forgotten Overnight, A Historic Event Glistens The Next Day Like The Morning Dew And Thus Is No Longer The Backdrop To A Narrator's Tale But Rather An Amazing Adventure Enacted Against The Background Of The Over-familiar Banality Of Private Life.
Morning
Moving
Adventure
Tereza Had Gone Back To Sleep; He Could Not. He Pictured Her Death. She Was Dead And Having Terrible Nightmares; But Because She Was Dead, He Was Unable To Wake Her From Them. Yes, That Is Death: Tereza Asleep, Having Terrible Nightmares, And He Unable To Wake Her.
Sleep
Gone
Nightmare
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