More Quotes by Milan Kundera
The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries.
Beauty is a rebellion against time.
People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.
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 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.
Merely by being born intelligent, you right away find yourself in absolute exile.
Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.
To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.
The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
