Milan Kundera Excerpts

From The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
  • "In the sunset of dissolution, everthing is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine."


  • "The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground.
    But in the 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."

  • "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."


  • "On Saturday and Sunday, he felt the sweet lightness of being rise up to him out of the depths of the future.
    On Monday, he was hit by a weight the likes of which h had never known.
    The tons of steel of the Russian tanks were nothing compared to it.
    For there is nothing heavier than compassion.
    Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes."


  • "The dreams were eloquent, but they were also beautiful.
    That aspect seems to have escaped Freud in his theory of dreams.
    Dreaming is not merely an act of communication (or coded communication, if you like); it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.
    Our dreams prove that to imagine -- to dream about things that have not happened -- is among mankind's deepest needs.
    Herein lies the danger.
    If dreams were not beautiful, they would quickly be forgotten."


  • "No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling.
    It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts us and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."

    "We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak.
    Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it.
    He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to do down, lower than down."
  • "Betrayal.
    From tender youth we are told by father and teacher that betrayal is the most heinous offense imaginable.
    But what is betrayal?
    Betrayal means breaking ranks.
    Betrayal means breaking ranks and going off into the unknown.
    Sabina knew of nothing more magnificent than going off into the unknown.

  • " 'Noise has one advantage.
    It drowns out words.'
    And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their content lost, they turned into trash, chaff, dust, sand;
    prowling through his brain, tearing at his head, they were his insomnia, his illness."


  • "(These are the questions that had been going through Tereza's head since she was a child.
    Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate.
    Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.
    They are the questions with no answers.
    A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached.
    In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.)"


  • "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.

    Then everyone took to shouting at the Communists:
    You're the ones responsible for our country's misfortunes ... for its loss of independence ... for its judicial murders!

    And the accused responded: We didn't know! We were deceived! We were true believers! Deep in our hearts we are innocent!

    In the end, the dispute narrowed down to a single question: Did they really not know or were they merely making believe? ...Is a fool on the throne relived of all responsibility merely because he is a fool?