“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.”

Milan Kundera
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Shame
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“A route differs from a road not only because it is solely intended for vehicles, but also because it is merely a line that connects one point with another. A route has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects. A road is a tribute to space. Every stretch of road has meaning in itself and invites us to stop. A route is the triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it has been reduced to a mere obstacle to human movement and a waste of time.”

Milan Kundera
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Traveling
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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?”

Milan Kundera
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programmes, 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.”

Milan Kundera
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.”

Milan Kundera
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Imagination
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“Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation.”

Milan Kundera
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Business
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“How goodness heightens beauty!”

Milan Kundera
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Beauty
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“Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.”

Milan Kundera
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Criticism
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“Solitude: a sweet absence of looks.”

Milan Kundera
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Solitude
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“Optimism is the opium of the people.”

Milan Kundera
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Optimism
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“Nudity is the uniform of the other side… nudity is a shroud.”

Milan Kundera
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Nudity
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“Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.”

Milan Kundera
Submitted by Quonation |Category: News
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“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Milan Kundera
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Memory
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“The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.”

Milan Kundera
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Laughter
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“I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.”

Milan Kundera
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Intellectual
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“The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.”

Milan Kundera
Submitted by Quonation |Category: General
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“Happiness is the longing for repetition.”

Milan Kundera
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Happiness
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“All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.”

Milan Kundera
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Fiction
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“Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.”

Milan Kundera
Submitted by Quonation |Category: General