The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

by Milan Kundera

in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.

The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.

the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.

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.

And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No,

‘sketch’ is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the ground-work for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.

making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite.

Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third or fourth life in which to compare various decisions.

Love is our freedom. Love lies beyond ‘Es muss sein!’