More Quotes by Milan Kundera
The man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present... he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future... he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.
The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries.
The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was... The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.
The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.
When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
Merely by being born intelligent, you right away find yourself in absolute exile.
The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.
