QUOTES FROM MILAN KUNDERA

“The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.”

“In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of consumption triumphs over the projects of art.”

“Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

“We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.”

“The future is a wave, obliterating everything in its path.”

“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.”

“Business has only one moral imperative: maximum profit.”

“No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.”

“Memory is a monster; you forget it doesn’t know what to feed on.”

“The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

“The power of beauty haunts us”

“Every solution breeds new problems.”

“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.” QUOTES ABOUT EMOTION

“The first step in the liquidation of a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history.”

“The scope of our understanding is constrained by the tyranny of the future.”

“We can never judge the lives of others, because each person knows only their own pain and renunciation.”

“Beauty is a constant that no one ever surprises.”

“No matter how we try, we cannot avoid becoming romantic.’

“No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away.”

“The emotion we feel when thinking of the past is not authentic—it is apathetic.”

“We always long for what we lack.”

“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.”

“Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”

“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.”

“People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It’s not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.”

“We are all mistaken sometimes; sometimes we do wrong things, things that have bad consequences. But it does not mean we are evil, or that we cannot be trusted ever afterward.”