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everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum!
a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.
There is an infinite difference between a Robespierre who occurs only once in history and a Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off French heads.
In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
This reconciliation with Hitler reveals the profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.
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 heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?
in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body.
The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.
which one is positive, weight or lightness? Parmenides responded: lightness is positive, weight negative. Was he correct or not? That is the question. The only certainty is: the lightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all.
Did he want her to come or did he not?
But was it love? The feeling of wanting to die beside her was clearly exaggerated: he had seen her only once before in his life!
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.
There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning,
Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
When she told him her suitcase was at the station, he immediately realized that the suitcase contained her life and that she had left it at the station only until she could offer it up to him.
How had he come to make such a sudden decision when for nearly a fortnight he had wavered so much that he could not even bring himself to send a postcard asking her how she was?
Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.
He wanted to be able to watch over her, protect her, enjoy her presence, but felt no need to change his way of life.
the goal of their lovemaking was not so much pleasure as the sleep that followed it.
He had complete control over her sleep: she dozed off at the second he chose.
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).
To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.
to have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with the other’s misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion—joy, anxiety, happiness, pain.
A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.
He had spent seven years of life with Tereza, and now he realized that those years were more attractive in retrospect than they were when he was living them.
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.
only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.
we believe that the greatness of man stems from the fact that he bears his fate as Atlas bore the heavens on his shoulders.
Apart from her consummated love for Tomas, there were, in the realm of possibility, an infinite number of unconsummated loves for other men.
We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same;
And that woman, that personification of absolute fortuity, now again lay asleep beside him, breathing deeply.
She had concentrated on the daring journey ahead of her and forgotten about food. But when we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.
Tereza’s mother never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything.
If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.
Our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences.
human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven’s music, death under a train) into a motif,
Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.
The difference between the university graduate and the autodidact lies not so much in the extent of knowledge as in the extent of vitality and self-confidence.
She had come to him to escape her mother’s world, a world where all bodies were equal. 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:
She had betrayed her mother, she told herself reproachfully, and for a man who did not love her.
Yes, the pictures of the invasion were something else again. She had not done them for Tomas. She had done them out of passion. But not passion for photography. She had done them out of passionate hatred. The situation would never recur.
Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.
In spite of their love, they had made each other’s life a hell.
Her first thought was that he had come back because of her; because of her, he had changed his destiny. Now he would no longer be responsible for her; now she was responsible for him.
No, it was not superstition, it was a sense of beauty that cured her of her depression and imbued her with a new will to live.
Not until later did she understand that the word “woman,” on which he had placed such uncommon emphasis, did not, in his eyes, signify one of the two human sexes; it represented a value. Not every woman was worthy of being called a woman.
It is an interesting formulation. Not “respect Marie-Claude,” but “respect the woman in Marie-Claude.” But if Marie-Claude is herself a woman, then who is that other woman hiding in her, the one he must always respect? The Platonic ideal of a woman, perhaps? No. His mother.
Communism was merely another father, a father equally strict and limited, a father who forbade her love (the times were puritanical) and Picasso, too.
