The Unbearable Lightness of Being

by Milan Kundera

A man who chooses to be a politician, say, voluntarily makes the public his judge, with the naive assurance that he will gain its favor. And if the crowd does express its disapproval, it merely goads him on to bigger and better things, much in the way Tomas was spurred on by the difficulty of a diagnosis.

How defenseless we are in the face of flattery!

When you sit face to face with someone who is pleasant, respectful, and polite, you have a hard time reminding yourself that nothing he says is true, that nothing is sincere.

frequent police interrogations. Tomas lacked that training.

Humiliating public statements are associated exclusively with the signatories’ rise, not fall.

Here he was, doing things he didn’t care a damn about, and enjoying it. Now he understood what made people (people he always pitied) happy when they took a job without feeling the compulsion of an internal “Es muss sein!” and forgot it the moment they left for home every evening.

she was pounding on the gate of his poetic memory. But the gate was shut. There was no room for her in his poetic memory. There was room for her only on the rug.

“We don’t want your advice. We want your signature!”

“Are you hesitating about joining the Red Army?” or “Haven’t you signed the Two Thousand Words yet?”

Tomas was talking to his son for the first time in his life! He was not used to sitting face to face with his own asymmetrical mouth! Imagine having an arm amputated and implanted on someone else.

“Some ideas have the force of a bomb exploding.”

“Unfortunately, I was the only casualty,” he said. “Thanks to those ideas, I can no longer operate on my patients.”

He was not at all sure he was doing the right thing, but he was sure he was doing what he wanted to do.

Should they have shown more courage than caution?

Einmal ist keinmal. What happens but once might as well not have happened at all.

History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.

earth (planet number one, the planet of inexperience)

During the five years that had passed since the Russian army invaded Tomas’s country, Prague had undergone considerable changes. The people Tomas met in the streets were different. Half of his friends had emigrated, and half of the half that remained had died.

the hopelessness pervading the entire country penetrated the soul to the body, shattering the latter.

He went home, lay down, and fell asleep earlier than usual. An hour later he woke up with stomach pains. They were an old malady that appeared whenever he was depressed.

either man was created in God’s image—and God has intestines!—or God lacks intestines and man is not like Him.

The unwritten, unsung motto of the parade was not “Long live Communism!” but “Long live life!” The power and cunning of Communist politics lay in the fact that it appropriated this slogan.

When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.

in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously);

the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions.

on the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth showing through.

none among us is superman enough to escape kitsch completely. No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.

the Grand March goes on, the world’s indifference notwithstanding, but it is growing nervous and hectic:

its pace grows faster and faster, until finally the Grand March is a procession of rushing, galloping people and the platform is shrinking and shrinking until one day it will be reduced to a mere dimension-less dot.

The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.