“Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”

 

“Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

 

 

“Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.”

― Milan Kundera

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“You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.”

― Milan Kundera

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.”

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. 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.”

― Milan Kundera

“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.”

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).”

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.”

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”

― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“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, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.”

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

 

“She had an overwhelming desire to tell him, like the most banal of women. Don't let me go, hold me tight, make me your plaything, your slave, be strong! But they were words she could not say.

The only thing she said when he released her from his embrace was, "You don't know how happy I am to be with you." That was the most her reserved nature allowed her to express.”

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

 

“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 

“There is no perfection only life”

― Milan Kundera 

“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.”

― Milan Kundera

“The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful ... 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

“A single metaphor can give birth to love.”

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being