Then I leave you more than 25 quotes of The Unbearable Lightness of Being , Philosophical novel of the Czech writer Milan Kundera, published in 1984.
You may also be interested in These phrases of philosophy .
1-The heaviest burden destroys us, we are knocked down by it, it crushes us against the earth. But in the amatory poetry of all times the woman wants to carry the weight of the body of man. The heaviest burden is therefore, at the same time, the image of the most intense fullness of life. The heavier the load, the lower our earth will be, the more real and true it will be.
2-What happens only once is as if it never happened. If man can only live a life is as if he did not live at all.
3-There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even the pain itself is as heavy as the pain felt with someone, by someone, for someone, multiplied by the imagination, prolonged in a thousand echoes.
4-But man, since he lives only one life, never has the possibility to test a hypothesis by means of an experiment and for that reason never it arrives to find out if he should have listened to his feeling or not.
5-Today, of course, the body is not unknown: we know that what strikes inside the chest is the heart and that the nose is the termination of a hose that protrudes from the body to carry oxygen to the lungs. The face is nothing more than a kind of instrument panel in which all the mechanisms of the body flow: digestion, sight, hearing, breathing, thinking.
6-Since we know how to name all its parts, the body less worries man. Now we also know that the soul is nothing more than the activity of the gray matter of the brain. The duality between the body and the soul has been veiled by scientific terms and we can happily laugh at it as a past-fashioned prejudice.
7-Only chance can appear before us as a message. What happens necessarily, what is expected, what is repeated every day, is mute. Only chance tells us. We try to read in it as the gypsies read the figures formed by the coffee grounds in the bottom of the cup.
8-Our daily life is bombarded by chance, more precisely by casual encounters of people and events that are called coincidences.
9-He who wants to permanently"get higher"has to expect that one day he will invade the vertigo.
10-What is vertigo? Fear of falling? But why does it also give us vertigo in a lookout with a secure fence? Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. Vertigo means that the depth that opens before us attracts us, seduces us, awakens in us the desire to fall, from which we defend ourselves in awe.
11-While people are young and the musical composition of their life is still in its early stages, they can write it together and exchange motives (just as Thomas and Sabina exchanged the hat-mushroom motif), but when they find themselves and are already older , His musical compositions are already more or less closed and each word, each object, means a different thing in the composition of the one and the one of the other.
12-The evaluation and examination of citizens is a permanent activity, the main of social activities in communist countries. If a painter has to be allowed an exhibition, if a citizen must obtain a visa to go during the holidays to the sea, if a player must be part of the national team, first have to gather all opinions and reports about him (Of the porter, of the co-workers, of the police, of the organization of the party, of the unions), then these are analyzed, weighed and summarized by special officials designated for those purposes. But what these opinions speak of does not refer to the ability of the citizen to paint, play football or if his health needs spending the holidays by the sea. It refers only and exclusively to what was called the"political profile of the citizen"(that is, what the citizen says, what he thinks, how he behaves, whether he participates in meetings and demonstrations of the citizen. first of May). Since everything (daily life, career and even vacations) depends on the evaluation of the citizen, everyone (if you want to play football on the national team, display your pictures or spend the holidays by the sea ) Has to behave in a positive way.
13-Of course, until now he had not been aware of it: the goal towards which man is precipitated is always veiled. The girl who wants to get married, wants something totally unknown to her. The young man who pursues glory does not know what glory is. That which gives meaning to our performance is always something totally unknown to us. Sabina did not know what purpose was hidden behind her desire to betray.
14-What is coquetry? It could be said that it is a behavior that tries to inform another person that a sexual approach is possible, so that this possibility never appears as security. Put another way: coquetry is a promise of coitus without guarantee.
15-People, for the most part, flee from their sorrows into the future. They imagine, in the course of time, a line beyond which their present pains will cease to exist.
16. The former are glad that the inflation of cowardice trivializes their attitude and returns the lost honor. The others have already become accustomed to consider their honor as a special privilege that they do not want to give up. That's why they have a secret love for cowards. Without them their courage would become an ordinary and useless endeavor that would not arouse the admiration of anyone.
17-It is tragicomic that our good education becomes an ally of the police. We do not know how to lie. The imperative"tell the truth!"That Mom and Dad instilled in us acts so automatically that even to the policeman who interrogates us, we are ashamed to lie. It is easier for us to argue with him, to insult him (which does not make any sense) than to lie to him blatantly (which is the only logical thing we can do).
18 - It is tragicomic that our good education becomes an ally of the police. We do not know how to lie. The imperative"tell the truth!"That Mom and Dad instilled in us acts so automatically that even to the policeman who interrogates us, we are ashamed to lie. It is easier for us to argue with him, to insult him (which does not make any sense) than to lie to him blatantly (which is the only logical thing we can do).
19-If excitement is the mechanism by which our Creator amuses himself, love is, on the contrary, what belongs to us alone and with what we escape to the Creator. Love is our freedom. Love is on the other side of the «es muss sein!»
20-The dispute between those who claim that the world was created by God and those who think that it arose by itself refers to something that surpasses the possibilities of our reason and our experience. Much more real is the difference that divides those who doubt the being that was given to man (by whoever he was and in whatever form) and to those who are unconditionally according to him.
"We all need someone to look at us." It would be possible to divide us into four categories, depending on the type of look under which we want to live.
The first category yearns for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, or in other words, the public eye. That is the case of the German singer, the American actress and also the editor with long beards. He was accustomed to his readers, and when one day the Russians closed their weekly, he had the feeling that the air was a hundred times rarer. No one could replace the look in his unfamiliar eyes. He thought he was drowning. It was then that he noticed that the police monitored all his steps, heard their conversations on the phone and even secretly took photos in the street. Suddenly the anonymous eyes were everywhere again and he could breathe again! I was happy! He was speaking in a theatrical voice to the microphones on the walls. He had found the lost public in the police.
The second category is formed by those who need to live the eyes of many known eyes. These are the tireless organizers of cocktails and dinners.
Then there is the third category, those who need the look of the loved one. Their situation is just as dangerous as that of the first category. Sometimes the eyes of the loved one will close and the darkness will be in the room. This group belongs to Teresa and Tomás.
And there is also a fourth category, the most prized, of those who live under the imaginary gaze of absent people. They are the dreamers. For example Franz. The only reason she traveled to the Cambodian border was Sabina. The bus rattles down the Thai road and he feels his long stare is fixed on him.
22-That right seems obvious to us because it is we who are at the top of that hierarchy. But it would suffice for a third party to enter the game, for example a visitor from another planet whom God had told him:"You will dominate the beings of all other stars,"and all the evidence of Genesis would suddenly become problematic. It is possible that the man attached to a chariot by a Martian, eventually grilled by a Milky Way being, then remember the veal chop he was accustomed to chop into his plate and apologize (late!) To Cow.
23-The true goodness of man can only be manifested with absolute cleanliness and freedom in relation to who does not represent any force. The true test of the morality of humanity, the deepest (situated to such a depth that escapes our perception), lies in its relationship with those who are at its mercy: animals. And here was where the fundamental debacle of man took place, so fundamental that all the others derive from it.
24-The unique character of the"I"is hidden precisely in what is unimaginable in man. We are only capable of imagining what is the same in all people, the general. The individual"I"is that which differs from the general, ie what can not be guessed and calculated in advance, what in the other it is necessary to discover, unveil, conquer.
26-Only in sexuality the millionth differential appears as something extraordinary, because it is not available to the public and it is necessary to conquer it. Not more than half a century ago it was necessary to dedicate such a conquest a long time (weeks and even months!), So that the period dedicated to the conquest was the measure of the value of the conquered. And even today, although the era of conquest has greatly reduced, sexuality remains the safe in which is hidden the secret of woman's self. So it was not the desire for pleasure (the pleasure came as a prize, in addition), but the desire to seize the world (to split with the scalpel the lying body of the world) what made him go after women.
26-Whoever looks for infinity, close your eyes.
27-And he knows that he would leave in any house his happiness, that he would at any moment abandon his paradise in which he lives with the girl of the dream, who would betray the"muss sein"of his love to go with Teresa, the woman Six ridiculous coincidences.