Kundera Unbearable Quotes

Philosophy can be said to consist of three activities: to see the commonsense answer, to get yourself so deeply into the problem that the common sense answer is unbearable, and to get from that situation back to the commonsense answer. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Since its beginnings, Western music is bound, by an insurmountable convention, to the need to express subjectivity. It stands against the harsh sound of the outside world just as the sensitive soul stands against the insensibility of the universe. ~ Milan Kundera

Jealousy has the amazing power to illuminate a single person in an intense beam of light, keeping the multitude of others in total darkness. ~ Milan Kundera

Jaromil had always regarded the future as an awesome mystery. It comprised everything unknown, and for that reason it lured and terrified. It was the opposite of certainty, the opposite of home. ~ Milan Kundera

But though predictions may be wrong, they are right about the people who voice them, not about their future but about their experience of the present moment ~ Milan Kundera

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. ~ Milan Kundera

If God's masons built real walls, I doubt we'd be able to destroy them. But instead of walls all I see is backdrops, sets. And sets are made to be destroyed. ~ Milan Kundera

We can combat existential anguish – the unbearable lightness of our being – in a variety of ways. We can choose to work, play, destroy, or create. We can allow a variety of cultural factors or other people to define who we are, or we can create a self-definition. We decide what to monitor in the environment. We regulate how much attention we pay to nature, other people, or the self. We can watch and comment upon current cultural events and worldly happenings or withdraw and ignore the external world. We can drink alcohol, dabble with recreational drugs, play videogames, or watch television, films, and sporting events. We can travel, go on nature walks, camp, fish, and hunt, climb mountains, or take whitewater-rafting trips. We can build, paint, sing, create music, write poetry, or read and write books. We can cook, barbeque, eat fine cuisine at restaurants or go on fasts. We can attend church services, worship and pray, or chose to embrace agnosticism or atheism. We can belong to charitable organizations or political parties. We can actively or passively support or oppose social and ecological causes. We can share time with family, friends, co-workers, and acquaintances or live alone and eschew social intermixing. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I would like to be able to convey to you the sound of dead voices, to break open this unbearable tomb of sound, to wrest something more than silhouettes from vanished years and by some unimaginable trick let you hear the ha-ha-ha with which Catulle Mendès accompanied the slightest sentence, the muffled voice of Edmond Rostand or the laughter which Proust smeared over his face with his white-gloved hand and his beard. ~ Jean Cocteau

But when one does not complain, and when one wants to master oneself with a tyrant's grip - one's faculties rise in revolt - and one pays for outward calm with an almost unbearable inner struggle. ~ Charlotte Bronte

They shout that they want to shape a better future, but it's not true. The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about,but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy it or repaint it. We want to be the masters of the future only for the power to change the past. We fight for access to the labs where we can retouch photos and rewrite biographies and history. ~ Milan Kundera

King Hussein never lost his faith, no matter how difficult and unbearable and cruel the circumstances could be. I always remember that. It helps me get through everything. It's a way of trying to keep that positive spirit alive for as many people as we can touch. I think that's good for the world. ~ Queen Noor Of Jordan

A gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as his creation (because no individual is capable of creating a fully original gesture, belonging to nobody else), nor can it even be regarded as that person's instrument; on the contrary, it is gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations ~ Milan Kundera

And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition. ~ Milan Kundera

The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become ~ Milan Kundera

No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Reethoven's Ninth, Rartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Reatles' White Album? ~ Milan Kundera

Indeed, all he remembers are situations that make him displeased with himself. ~ Milan Kundera

What those years said of themselves was that they were the most joyous of years, and anyone who failed to rejoice was immediately suspected of lamenting the victory of the working class or |what was equally sinful| giving way individualistically to inner sorrows. ~ Milan Kundera

If through practice of insight you develop a sense of ease, then time has no relevance. If you're miserable, time does matter. It's so unbearable, so enormous you want to get out of it as soon as possible. ~ Dalai Lama

If 'other people have experiences incorrectly' is annoying to you, think how unbearable it must be to have a condescending stranger tell you they hate the way you're experiencing your life at just the moment you've found something you want to remember. ~ Randall Munroe

He makes you the person you want to be,
instead of the person you are, and that, the idea of life without him is,
not only unbearable, it's unimaginable. ~ E.L. James

Loneliness is a long, unbearable pain ... There was never a place for me in the scheme of things ... I had become a living fantasy on a theme in dark, endless dirges ... I made another world, and real men would enter it and they would never really get hurt at all in the vivid, unreal laws of the dream. I caused dreams which caused death. This is my crime. ~ Dennis Nilsen

If only we were wiser or better people, perhaps the gods would explain to us the mad, unbearable things they do. ~ Orson Scott Card

...sometimes, when you were guilty of something, others' pretense that you weren't responsible was the unbearable part. It was infantilizing, demeaning. ~ Angie Kim

the reverse side of love is unbearable loss. ~ Susan Abulhawa

We continue the chain of generations and, knowingly or not, willingly or unwillingly, we pay debts of the past: as long as we have not cleared the slate, an "invisible loyalty" impels us to repeat and repeat a moment of incredible joy or unbearable sorrow, an injustice or a tragic death. Or its echo. ~ Anne Ancelin Schutzenburger

I pull his hair a little harder while pushing his head harder against me. His fingers curl inside me, stroking my spot as his tongue caresses my clit with increased urgency." - Sofia Herrera (Never Say Never, Unbearable Passion, #1) ~ Scarlett Avery

When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it. ~ Milan Kundera

Wine's terrible for babies." Dorian swept into the sitting room to join me, elegantly arranging himself on a love seat that displayed his purple velvet robes to best effect.
"Well of course it is. I'd never dream of giving wine to an infant! What do you take me for, a barbarian? But for you ... well, it might go a long way to make you a little less jumpy. You've been positively unbearable to live around.
"I can't have it either. It affects the babies in utero. ~ Richelle Mead

For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought. ~ Milan Kundera

When you go through a long illness, certainly one of cancer, there's a certain release from it and relief that it has come to an end, because the suffering can be unbearable, as opposed to an abrupt stop to life when they go out the door and there's a loved one who never comes home because of some accident. ~ Pierce Brosnan

Friends. Strange indeed. There's just so much at risk, including my heart and mental stability - which are both still extremely fragile. I'm getting better but my heart still aches for you. I'm also having a hard time dealing with the fear. I don't want to be sad anymore. I don't want to cry, worry, or be scared anymore. I just wish I could feel free and happy again. If I can't talk to you at all, it's unbearable. If I talk to you too much, it's unbearable. It doesn't leave much. I want us both to be happy. I just want everything to be okay for you and me. I don't want anyone else to hurt. I feel like I've hurt enough for everyone. I've cried enough tears to fill everyone's bucket. ~ Elizabeth Scott

In the diary you find proof that in situations which today would seem unbearable, you lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand moved then as it does today, when we may be wiser because we are able to look back upon our former condition, and for that very reason have got to admit the courage of our earlier striving in which we persisted even in sheer ignorance. ~ Franz Kafka

The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness? ~ Milan Kundera

Because misogynists are the best of men." All the poets reacted to these words with hooting. Boccaccio was forced to raise his voice: "Please understand me. Misogynists don't despise women. Misogynists don't like femininity. Men have always been divided into two categories. Worshipers of women, otherwise known as poets, and misogynists, or, more accurately, gynophobes. Worshipers or poets revere traditional feminine values such as feelings, the home, motherhood, fertility, sacred flashes of hysteria, and the divine voice of nature within us, while in misogynists or gynophobes these values inspire a touch of terror. Worshipers revere women's femininity, while misogynists always prefer women to femininity. Don't forget: a woman can be happy only with a misogynist. No woman has ever been happy with any of you! ~ Milan Kundera

[She] was easy to enjoy but hard to know."
...
"It's unbearable, the not knowing. ~ Emma Donoghue

You know, there's a moment when you're famous when it's unbearable to go out because you're too famous. And then there's a moment when you're famous just right. ~ Steve Martin

She had become unmoored from the present, loose and untethered, her mind rolling back into her memories, rolling forward into the future, anticipating, and then dropping again into this torturous, unbearable present. ~ Laura Ruby

It is unbearable to be deprived of your country.' Come now, look at this mass of people whom the buildings of huge Rome can scarcely hold: most of that crowd are deprived of their country. ~ Seneca.

Life is bearable even when it's unbearable: that is what's so terrible, that is the unbearable thing about it. ~ Geoff Dyer

Don't go," he said, and his voice was so soft and imploring that it took my breath away. But I was already going. I barely heard him call out to me: "I need you. You're the only friend I have." How tragic those words! I wanted to say I was sorry, sorry for all of it. But it was too late now for that. And besides, I think he knew. All life seemed utterly unbearable to me now. ~ Anne Rice