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Quotes from Immortality — Milan Kundera

1929–2023 Czech Republic

← All quotes by Milan Kundera

9 quotes

I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.

Immortality (1988)

Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.

Immortality (1988)

Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.

Immortality (1988)

Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.

Immortality (1988)

Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of nonthought.

Immortality (1988)

The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen.

Immortality (1988)

The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.

Immortality (1988)

We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.

Immortality (1988)

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.

Immortality (1988)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Milan Kundera (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.