November 21, 2010

A few quotes from Milan Kundera, *The Unbearable Lightness of Being*

Kundera, Milan, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Faber and Faber, 1999.

If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all. P.8

Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: the criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to execute many people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers. P.171

And again he thought the thought we already know: Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good, and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third or fourth life in which to compare various decisions. P.219

The longing for paradise is man’s longing not to be man. P.293

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