You certainly remember this scene from dozens of films: a boy and a girl are running hand in hand in a beautiful spring (or summer) landscape. Running, running, running and laughing. By laughing the two runners are proclaiming to the whole world, to audiences in all the movie theaters: "We're happy, we're glad to be in the world, we're in agreement with being!" It's a silly scene, a cliche, but it expresses a basic human attitude: serious laughter, laughter "beyond joking."

All churches, all underwear manufacturers, all generals, all political parties, are in agreement about that kind of laughter, and all of them rush to put the image of the two laughing runners on the billboards advertising their religion, their products, their ideology, their nation, their sex, their dishwashing powder.


Milan Kundera

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MILAN KUNDERA
There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We ...
MILAN KUNDERA
I want you to be weak. As weak as I am.
MILAN KUNDERA
The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records ever...
MILAN KUNDERA
A single metaphor can give birth to love.
MILAN KUNDERA
she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as...
MILAN KUNDERA
She had an overwhelming desire to tell him, like the most banal of women. Don't let me go, hold me t...
MILAN KUNDERA
The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed...
MILAN KUNDERA
[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.
MILAN KUNDERA
During the twenty years of Odesseus' absence, the people of Ithaca retained many recollections of hi...
MILAN KUNDERA
ქვეყნისათვის სიცოცხლის გაწირვა: ყველ...
MILAN KUNDERA
Mesmerized, all she can do is watch this piece of her life move off; all she can do is watch it and ...
MILAN KUNDERA
All predictions are wrong, that's one of the few certainties granted to mankind.
MILAN KUNDERA
In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You...
MILAN KUNDERA
If in the past people would listen to music out of love for music, nowadays it roars everywhere and ...
MILAN KUNDERA
إذ يستطيع جيشان كبيران أن يتصارعا حتى الموت من أجل قضاي...
MILAN KUNDERA
A person who messes up her goodbyes shouldn't expect much from her reunions.
MILAN KUNDERA
That’s another enigma about memory, more basic than all the rest: do recollections have some measu...
MILAN KUNDERA
كلما كان الزمن الذي نخلفه وراءنا أكبر كلما أصبح الصوت ا...
MILAN KUNDERA
In Spanish añoranza comes from the verb añorar (to feel nostalgia), which comes from the Catalan e...
MILAN KUNDERA
Remembering now all those farewells (fake farewells, worked-up farewells), Irena thinks: a person wh...
MILAN KUNDERA
تختفي الذكريات إذا لم تُستحضر مرة وأخرى في أحاديث الأص�...
MILAN KUNDERA
أتخيل انفعال كائنين يلتقيان بعد سنوات. قديما تعاشرا، ف�...
MILAN KUNDERA
Now time has a very different look; it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future; it ...
MILAN KUNDERA
When she is older she will see in these resemblances a regrettable uniformity among individuals (the...
MILAN KUNDERA
We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who ...
MILAN KUNDERA
En griego, «regreso» se dice nostos. Algos significa “sufrimiento”. La nostalgia es, pues, el ...
MILAN KUNDERA
And there lies the horror: the past we remember is devoid of time. Impossible to reexperience a love...
MILAN KUNDERA
The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us...
MILAN KUNDERA
Man can only be certain about the present moment. But is that quite true either? Can he really know ...
MILAN KUNDERA
To die; to decide to die; that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't deat...
MILAN KUNDERA
The girl was grateful to the young man for every bit of flattery; she wanted to linger for a moment ...
MILAN KUNDERA
Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything ex...
MILAN KUNDERA
Flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.
MILAN KUNDERA
The only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place ...
MILAN KUNDERA
But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.
MILAN KUNDERA
Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and ...
MILAN KUNDERA
When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of he...
MILAN KUNDERA
Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional ...
MILAN KUNDERA
Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she...
MILAN KUNDERA
The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of f...
MILAN KUNDERA
In the political jargon of those days, the word "intellectual" was an insult. It indicated someone w...
MILAN KUNDERA
A young woman forced to keep drunks supplied with beer and siblings with clean underwear -instead of...
MILAN KUNDERA
I had all kinds of answers ready for the commissions that called me in and asked me what had made me...
MILAN KUNDERA
Too much faith is the worst ally. When you believe in something literally, through your faith you'll...
MILAN KUNDERA
I know, brother, that you are a straightforward man, and that you pride yourself on it. But put one ...
MILAN KUNDERA
Certainty. Life's last and kindest gift.
MILAN KUNDERA
Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by t...
MILAN KUNDERA
Kitsch is the inability to admit that shit exists
MILAN KUNDERA
Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.
MILAN KUNDERA
To laugh is to live profoundly.
MILAN KUNDERA
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting
MILAN KUNDERA
The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.
...
MILAN KUNDERA