The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us. Sabina was unaware of the goal that lay behind her longing to betray. The unbearable lightness of being – was that the goal?
Whether it’s good luck or bad to be born onto this earth, the best way to spend a life here is to let yourself be carried along, as I am at this moment, by a cheerful, noisy crowd moving forward.
But, he said to himself, whether they knew or didn’t know is not the main issue; the main issue is whether a man is innocent because he didn’t know. Is a fool on the throne relieved of all responsibility merely because he is a fool?
Suicide is worse than murder. One can murder for vengeance or out of greed, but even greed is the expression of a perverted love of life. But to commit suicide is to throw one’s life down contemptuously at God’s feet.
No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemeteries... When she felt low, she would get into the car, leave Prague far behind, and walk through one or another of the country cemeteries she loved so well. Against a backdrop of blue hills, they were as beautiful as a lullaby.
Whoever wishes to remember must not stay in one place, waiting for the memories to come of their own accord! Memories are scattered all over the immense world, and it takes voyaging to find them and make them leave their refuge.
We’ve known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world, nor reshape it, nor head off its dangerous headlong rush. There’s been one possible resistance: to not take it seriously. But I think our jokes have lost their power... All you get out of it is weariness and boredom.
It seemed to me an error in reasoning for a man to isolate a woman he loves from all the circumstances in which he met her and in which she lives, to try, with dogged inner concentration, to purify her of everything that is not her self, which is to say also of the story that they lived through together and that gives their love its shape.
Jaromil had always regarded the future as an awesome mystery. It comprised everything unknown, and for that reason it lured and terrified. It was the opposite of certainty, the opposite of home.
The man of fantasy must become the man of action, the adventure of dreams the adventure of life.
In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it.
A person finds it distasteful to hear his life recounted with a different interpretation from his own.
Whe you sit face to face with someone who is pleasant, respectful and polite, you have a hard time reminding yourself that nothing he says is true, that nothing is sincere. Maintaining nonbelief requires a tremendous effort and the proper training.
I am obedient. I can never say no to those weaker than myself. And because I am six feet two and can lift a two-hundred-pound sack with one hand, in all my life I have yet to find anyone I can resist.
He knew very well that his memory detested him, that it did nothing but slander him; therefore he tried not to believe it and to be more lenient toward his own life. But that didn’t help: he took no pleasure in looking back, and he did it as seldom as possible.
That is the secret of poetry. We burn in the woman we adore, we burn in the thought we espouse, we burn in the landscape that moves us.
All predictions are wrong, that’s one of the few certainties granted to mankind. But though predictions may be wrong, they are right about the people who voice them, not about their future but about their experience of the present moment.
Unintentional beauty. Another way of putting it might be ‘beauty by mistake’. Before beauty disappears entirely from the earth, it will go on existing for a while by mistake. Beauty by mistake – the final phase in the history of beauty.
To be absolutely modern is to be the ally of one’s grave diggers.
You must admit: it’s not easy to live with people willing to send you to exile or death, it’s not easy to become intimate with them, its not easy to love them.