45 quotes
Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
The fact that until recently the word “shit” appeared in print as s— has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can’t claim that shit is immoral, after all!
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
It is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
The moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
"Love is a battle," said Marie-Claude, still smiling. "And I plan to go on fighting. To the end."
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988)
No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
What makes a leftist a leftist is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
Chance and chance alone has a message for us... Only chance can speak to us.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
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.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
This reconciliation with Hitler reveals the profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
He had spent seven years of his life with Tereza, and now he realised that those years were more attractive in retrospect than they were when he was living them.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
It was the call of all those fortuities... which gave her the courage to leave home and change her fate.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)