The Unbearable Lightness of Being

by Milan Kundera

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.

But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?

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

he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.

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?

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.

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

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).

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.

necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: 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.

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

the love story of his life exemplified not “Es muss sein!” (It must be so), but rather “Es könnte auch anders sein” (It could just as well be otherwise).

when we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.

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

But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?

If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi’s shoulders.

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, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life.

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

All her eagerness for life hung by a thread: Tomas’s voice. For it was Tomas’s voice that had once coaxed forth her timorous soul from its hiding place in her bowels.

Anyone whose goal is “something higher” must expect some day to suffer vertigo.

vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down.

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.

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.

And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their content lost, they turned into trash, chaff, dust, sand; prowling through his brain, tearing at his head, they were his insomnia, his illness.

Europe was the Grand March. The march from revolution to revolution, from struggle to struggle, ever onward.

conflict, drama, and tragedy didn’t mean a thing; there was nothing inherently valuable in them, nothing deserving of respect or admiration.

No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery.

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.

living in truth meant breaking down the barriers between the private and the public.

And so within an amazingly short period the backdrop of his life had changed completely.

What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.

Until that time, her betrayals had filled her with excitement and joy, because they opened up new paths to new adventures of betrayal. But what if the paths came to an end? One could betray one’s parents, husband, country, love, but when parents, husband, country, and love were gone—what was left to betray?

What is flirtation? One might say that it is behavior leading another to believe that sexual intimacy is possible, while preventing that possibility from becoming a certainty. In other words, flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.

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.

a basic truth: the criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to execute many people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers.

As a result of your “not knowing,” this country has lost its freedom, lost it for centuries, perhaps, and you shout that you feel no guilt? How can you stand the sight of what you’ve done? How is it you aren’t horrified? Have you no eyes to see? If you had eyes, you would have to put them out and wander away from Thebes!

an idea can be refuted, yes, but not retracted.

German is a language of heavy words. “Es muss sein!” was no longer a joke; it had become “der schwer gefasste Entschluss” (the difficult or weighty resolution).

Internal imperatives are all the more powerful and therefore all the more of an inducement to revolt.

What is unique about the “I” hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person.

The individual “I” is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.

love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities.

Is it better to shout and thereby hasten the end, or to keep silent and gain thereby a slower death?

But many also died without being directly subjected to persecution; the hopelessness pervading the entire country penetrated the soul to the body, shattering the latter.