Encounter Quotes

“It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue - perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“Today I know this: when it comes time to take stock, the most painful wound is that of broken friendships; and there is nothing more foolish than to sacrifice a friendship to politics.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“When his wife was at his side, she was also in front of him, marking out the horizon of his life. Now the horizon is empty: the view has changed.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“...in our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener)”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“Fortunately, I read (the books) without knowing what I was in for, and the best thing that can ever happen to a reader happened to me: I loved something that, by conviction (or by my nature) I should not have loved”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“عندما أسمع اسم تولستوي, أتصور على الفور روايتيه العظيمتين التي لا يشبههما شيء. وعندما أنطق أسماء سارتر وكامو ومالرو, فإن ما تثيره في شخصياتهم هو سيرهم وجدالاتهم ومعاركهم ومواقفهم.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“ذلك أن شغف المعرفة عند الروائي لا يستهدف السياسة ولا التاريخ. ما الجديد الذي بإمكان روائي أن يكتشفه حول الأحداث الموصوفة والمناقشة في آلاف الكتب الرصينة المتنوعة؟”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“The novel was born with the Modern Era, which made man, to quote Heidegger, the "only real subject," the ground for everything. It is largely through the novel that man as an individual was established on the European scene. Away from the novel, in our real lives, we know very little about our parents as they were before our birth; we have only fragmentary knowledge of the people close to us: we see them come and go and scarcely have they vanished than their place is taken over by others: they form a long line of replaceable beings. Only the novel separates out an individual, trains a light on his biography, his ideas, his feelings, makes him irreplaceable: makes him the center of everything.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“Art must always stand guard against stirring emotions that lie outside the aesthetic: sexual arousal, terror, disgust, shock.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“Bacon's portraits are an interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved person still remain a beloved person? For how long does a cherished face growing remote through illness, through madness, through hatred, through death still remain recognizable? Where is the border beyond which a self ceases to be a self?”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“He looks at houses, chateaus, forests, and thinks about the countless generations who used to see those things and who are gone now; and he understands that everything he is seeing is oblivion; pure oblivion, the oblivion whose absolute state will soon be achieved, the moment he himself is gone. And again I think about the obvious idea (that astoundingly obvious idea) that everything that exists (nation, thought, music) can also not exist.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“للتجديدات الشكلية التي يقوم بها الأساتذة الكبار, دائماً, أمر ما خفي, وتلك هي علامة التجويد الكبرى. التجديد لا يبدو ذا نزوع للفت الإنتباه إلا عند الأساتذة الصغار.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“(God) being the old man invented in order to, and with whom to, hold long conversations.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“Isn't that exactly the definition of biography? An artificial logic imposed on an 'incoherent succession of images'?”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“لم يبتلع التاريخ أفكاره و عواطفه فقط، بل ابتلع زمن حياته و إيقاعها، إنه الرجل الذي التهمه التاريخ، إنه ليس أكثر من حشو بشري للتاريخ. و قد كانت للروائي جرأة إلتقاط هذا الهول”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“The formal innovations of the great masters always have a certain discreetness about them; such is true perfection; only among the small masters does novelty seek to call attention to itself.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“The different arts reach our brains in different ways; they lodge there with differing ease, at different speeds, with different degrees of inevitable simplifications; and for different durations”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“That's how it is: even in the throes of death, man is always on stage. And even 'the plainest' of them, the least exhibitionist, because it's not always the man himself who climbs on stage. If he doesn't do it, someone will put him there. That is his fate as a man.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“In our time people have learned to subordinate friendship to what’s called “convictions.” And even with a prideful tone of moral correctness. It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth. Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue—perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“Without that discovery of the "moving photo," the world today would not be what it is: the new technology has become, primo, the principal agent of stupidity (incomparably more powerful than the bad literature of old: advertisements, television series); and secundo, the agent of worldwide indiscretion (cameras secretly filming political adversaries in compromising situations, immortalizing the pain of a half-naked woman laid out on a stretcher after a street bombing). It is true that film as art does also exist, but its significance is far more limited than that of film as technology, and its history is certainly shorter than that of any other art.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“Since its beginnings, Western music is bound, by an insurmountable convention, to the need to express subjectivity. It stands against the harsh sound of the outside world just as the sensitive soul stands against the insensibility of the universe.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“What fascinated him was the new way of being European”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter: Essays – A Passionate Defense of Art and Beauty: What It Means to Be Human

“an oratorio by Arnold Schoenberg”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter: Essays – A Passionate Defense of Art and Beauty: What It Means to Be Human

“what does a life mean? A long succession of events whose deceptive surface is meant to hide Sin.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter: Essays – A Passionate Defense of Art and Beauty: What It Means to Be Human

“the advertising spot is also a genre of cinematography”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter: Essays – A Passionate Defense of Art and Beauty: What It Means to Be Human

“than art”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter: Essays – A Passionate Defense of Art and Beauty: What It Means to Be Human