Iselilja > Iselilja's Quotes

“If your brains were dynamite there wouldn't be enough to blow your hat off.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

“We could have saved [the Earth] but we were too damned cheap.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Life is no way to treat an animal.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.”
― Milan Kundera

“You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.”
― Milan Kundera

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than 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.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring--it was peace.”
― Milan Kundera

“Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“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.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“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.”
― Milan Kundera

“People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.”
― Milan Kundera

“There is no perfection only life”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“A single metaphor can give birth to love.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful ... Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“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, like an actor going on cold. 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 a word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be.”
― Milan Kundera, The Joke

“To laugh is to live profoundly.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“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.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.”
― Milan Kundera

“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.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being