"Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.
~ Milan Kundera ~
Photo by Ákos Szabó
Photo by Ian Turnell
The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.
More Milan Kundera quotes
"Never had she let herself go in this way with another body, and never had another body let itself go with her in this way. Her lover could play with h...
"This scene expresses the basic situation of immaturity; lyricism is an attempt to face that situation: the individual expelled from the protected encl...
"He was looking for immensity. His life was hopelessly small, everything surrounding him was nondescript and gray. And death is absolute; it is indivis...
"He yearned to step out of his life the way one steps out of a house into the street.
"A meadow is nothing but a field of suffering. Every second some creature is dying in the gorgeous green expanse, ants eat wriggling earthworms, birds ...
"Do you think that a doe in the jaws of a tiger feels less horror than you? People thought up the idea that animals don't have the same capability for ...
"Because beyond their practical function, all gestures have a meaning that exceeds the intention of those who make them; when people in bathing suits f...
"I say, indeed: "consolation in the nonsentience of nature." For nonsentience is consoling; the world of nonsentience is the world outside human life; ...
"Every situation is of man's making and can only contain what man contains.
"He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seek...
"The termites of reduction have always gnawed away at life: even the greatest love ends up as a skeleton of feeble memories.
"I thought of the fate of Descartes’ famous formulation: man as ‘master and proprietor of nature.’ Having brought off miracles in science and technolog...
"She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with wall...
"You certainly remember this scene from dozens of films: a boy and a girl are running hand in hand in a beautiful spring (or summer) landscape. Running...