Unbearable Lightness Of Being Quotes

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 … Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.

Yes, if you’re looking for infinity, just close your eyes!

To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.

In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body.

The senator had only one argument in his favour: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.

Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.

it is wrong to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences… but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life a dimension of beauty.

Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).

The world goes on as before, and it turns out that nobody else seems to to notice the unbearable lightness of being.

loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.

Necessity knows no magic formulae-they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi’s shoulders.

Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent.

Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.

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.

In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood

Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor

Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.

Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.

True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.

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

On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.

The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.

When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.

He suddenly recalled from Plato’s Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death.

And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?

Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with.

To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring – it was peace.

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.

In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse.

Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.

Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.

A single metaphor can give birth to love.