The Unbearable Lightness of Being Quotes

“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.”

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

topic:lovememorywomanpoetry

“love means renouncing strength”

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

topic:lovestrength

“Once her love had been publicized, it would gain weight, become a burden.”

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

topic:love

“Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.”

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

topic:lovesoul

“History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.”

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

topic:lifehistoryexistence

“Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.”

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

topic:lifebeauty

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

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

topic:life

“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...”

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

topic:life

“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.”

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

topic:lifewant

“We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, sketch is not quite the word, because a sketch...”

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

topic:life