Actually, he had always preferred the unreal to the real.
She surrendered her body to the judgment of someone else’s eyes- and that was a source of anxious uncertainty.
The life we have left behind us has a bad habit of stepping out of the shadows, of bringing complaints against us, of taking us to court.
Elisabeth, can’t you imagine that you could love someone so terribly that just because of it you couldn’t go to bed with him?
He who gives himself up like a prisoner of war must give up his weapons as well. And deprived in advance of defense against a possible blow, he cannot help wondering when the blow will fall. That is why I can say that for Franz, love meant the constant expectation of a blow.
I imagine the feelings of two people meeting after many years. In the past they spent some time together, and therefore they think they are linked by the same experience, the same recollections. The same recollections? That’s where the misunderstanding starts: they don’t, have the same recollections; each of them retains two or three small scenes from the past, but each has his own; their recollections are not similar; they don’t intersect.
She felt happy in Paris, happier than here, but only Prague held her by a secret bond of beauty.
Everyone is wrong about the future.
The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It’s unintentional. It arose independent of human design, like a stalagmitic cavern. Forms which are in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with a sudden wondrous poetry.
If we do not know what future the present is leading us toward, how can we say whether this present is good or bad, whether it deserves our concurrence, or our suspicion, or our hatred?
The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty. If we cannot change the world, let’s at least change our lives and live them freely.
The scene taking place illustrates an immemorial error of men: having appropriated the role of seducers, they never even consider any women but the ones they might desire; the idea doesn’t occur to them that a woman who is ugly or old, or who simply stands outside their own erotic imaginings, might want to possess them.
The moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful.
If every life is unique, let’s live uniquely. Let’s reject everything that is not fresh and new. It is necessary to be absolutely modern.
Human life is bounded by two chasms: fanaticism on one side, absolute skepticism on the other.
He had spent seven years of his life with Tereza, and now he realized that those years were more attractive in retrospect than they were when he was living them.
What drove such people to their sinister occupations? Spite? Certainly, but also the desire for order. Because the desire for order tries to transform the human world into an inorganic reign in which everything goes well, everything functions as a subject of an impersonal will. The desire for order is at the same time a desire for death, because life is a perpetual violation of order. Or, inversely, the desire for order is a virtuous pretext by which man’s hatred for man justifies its crimes.
If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross.
Is it right to raise one’s voice when others are being silenced? Yes.
A sudden happiness, a feeling of bliss, the joy that came of freedom and a new life – these were the gifts she had left him.