The Unbearable Lightness of Being

by Milan Kundera

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

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.

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?

Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.

I might even say that the goal of their lovemaking was not so much pleasure as the sleep that followed it.

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).

Tereza saw herself threatened by women, all women. All women were potential mistresses for Tomas, and she feared them all.

To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.

He understood Tereza, and not only was he incapable of being angry with her, he loved her all the more.

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.

But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.

If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.

For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the books she took out of the municipal library, and above all, the novels.

Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

She had come to him to make her body unique, irreplaceable. But he, too, had drawn an equal sign between her and the rest of them: he kissed them all alike, stroked them alike, made no, absolutely no distinction between Tereza’s body and the other bodies.

The cause of her mother’s malice was that she had suffered so.

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

He who gives himself up like a prisoner of war must give up his weapons as well.

While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.

Not every woman was worthy of being called a woman.

The first betrayal is irreparable. It calls forth a chain reaction of further betrayals, each of which takes us farther and farther away from the point of our original betrayal.

“When a society is rich, its people don’t need to work with their hands; they can devote themselves to activities of the spirit.

That’s why one banned book in your former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out by our universities.”

From that time on she had known that beauty is a world betrayed. The only way we can encounter it is if its persecutors have overlooked it somewhere. Beauty hides behind the scenes of the May Day parade. If we want to find it, we must demolish the scenery.

Physical love is unthinkable without violence.

“Because love means renouncing strength,”

living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies.

When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation

in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness.

Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.

The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.

were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.

Between his earthly love and his unearthly love, therefore, there was perfect peace.

that perverse need one has to expose one’s ruins, one’s ugliness, to parade one’s misery, to uncover the stump of one’s amputated arm and force the whole world to look at it.

A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.)

But by making it important and serious, she deprived it of its lightness, and it became forced, labored, overdone.

Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.

For that edifice rested on the single column of her fidelity, and loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.

Is a fool on the throne relieved of all responsibility merely because he is a fool?