The Unbearable Lightness of Being is the masterpiece of Milan Kundera, a writer from the Czech Republic. It deals with the nonsense of the main character's life, and the play is heavily influenced by concepts from Nietzsche's philosophy.
The idea of lightness is expressed through the love and marriage relationships of its characters. Tomás is unfaithful, although he loves Teresa, his wife. Sabina, Tomás's lover, is related to several engaged men. It is in her, Sabina, where the idea of lightness, lightness, not giving importance to things, to life, and leading a meaningless and amoral existence is best perceived.
Here are the best quotes of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which you will be able to observe the ideas of Milan Kundera on the eternal return, the existential problem, love, infidelities, marriage, sex, beauty, daily life, women, among other topics.
-The idea of the eternal return is mysterious and with it Nietzsche perplexed the other philosophers: to think that once everything has to be repeated as we have already lived it, and that even that repetition has to be repeated ad infinitum! What does that crazy myth mean?
-If each of the moments of our life is going to be repeated infinitely many times, we are nailed to eternity like Jesus Christ to the cross. The image is terrible. In the world of eternal return, the weight of an unbearable responsibility rests on each gesture. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest burden (das schwerste Gewicht).
-Then he felt an inexplicable love for an almost unknown girl; It seemed to him a child that someone had placed in a basket greased with fish and sent it down the river for Tomás to pick it up at the edge of his bed.
-Man can never know what he should want, because he lives only one life and has no way of comparing it with his previous lives or of amending it in his later lives..
-There is no possibility of checking which of the decisions is the best, because there is no comparison. The man lives it all the first time and without preparation. As if an actor performed his work without any kind of rehearsal.
-He wanted to be sure that erotic friendship would never become the aggressiveness of love, and that is why he maintained long pauses between encounters with each of his lovers..
-You have to keep the rule of number three. It is possible to see a woman several times in a row, but in such a case no more than three times. It is also possible to maintain a relationship for years, but on the condition that at least three weeks pass between each meeting..
-Tomás told himself: making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two passions that are not only different but almost contradictory. Love is not manifested in the desire to sleep with someone (this desire occurs in relation to an innumerable number of women), but in the desire to sleep with someone (this desire occurs in relation to a single woman).
-The dreams were repeated as variations on themes or as television serials. Often they were repeated, for example dreams about cats that jumped in his face and nailed their nails. We can find a fairly simple explanation for this: in Czech slang, cat is the name of a beautiful woman.
-All languages derived from Latin form the word "compassion" with the prefix "com-" and the word pas-sio which originally meant "suffering". This word is translated into other languages, for example Czech, Polish, German, to Swedish, by means of a noun composed of a prefix of the same meaning, followed by the word "feeling"; in Czech: sou-cit; in Polish: wspólczucie; in German: Mit-gefühl; in Swedish: med-kánsla.
-In languages derived from Latin, the word "compassion" means: we cannot look undaunted at the suffering of the other; or: we participate in the feelings of the one who suffers. In another word, in the French pitié (in the English pity, in the Italian pieta, etc.), which has approximately the same meaning, there is even a certain indulgence towards the one who suffers. Avoir de la pifié pour une femme means that our situation is better than that of the woman, that we lean towards her, that we lower ourselves.
- The secret power of its etymology illuminates the word with another light and gives it a broader meaning: having compassion means knowing how to live with another his misfortune, but also feel with him any other feeling: joy, anguish, happiness, pain.
-It was a party drunk with hatred. Czech cities were adorned with thousands of hand-painted posters, with ironic texts, epigrams, poems, caricatures of Brezhnev and his army, which everyone laughed like a gang of illiterates. But there is no party that lasts forever.
-The realization that he was absolutely powerless struck him as a blow, but at the same time reassured him. No one forced him to make any decisions. You don't have to look at the wall of the building across the street and wonder whether or not you want to live with it..
-The love that existed between him and Teresa was beautiful, but also tiring: he had to be permanently hiding something, disguising it, pretending, fixing it, keeping her happy, comforting her, constantly demonstrating his love, being accused of his jealousy, his suffering, his dreams, feeling guilty, justifying and apologizing.
-Unlike Parmenides, for Beethoven weight was obviously a positive thing. "Der Schwer gefasste Entschluss", a weighty decision, goes hand in hand with the voice of Destiny ("es muss sein"); weight, need and value are three internally linked concepts: only what is necessary has weight; only that which has weight, okay.
-Any schoolboy can do experiments during physics class and check whether a certain scientific hypothesis is true. But man, since he lives only one life, never has the possibility of testing a hypothesis by means of an experiment and therefore never manages to find out whether he should have listened to his feeling or not..
-We all consider it unthinkable that the love of our life could be something light, without weight; We believe that our love is something that had to be; that without him our life would not be our life. It seems to us that the sullen Beethoven himself, with his terrible mane, plays for our great love his "es muss sein!".
-It would be stupid for the author to try to convince the reader that his characters are really alive. They were not born from the body of their mothers, but from one or two suggestive phrases or from a basic situation. Tomás was born from the phrase "einmal ist keinmal". Teresa was born from a tummy that made noise.
-Since we know how to name all its parts, the body is less disturbing to man. Now we also know that the soul is nothing more than the activity of the gray matter of the brain. The duality between body and soul has been veiled by scientific terms, and we can giggle at it as an old-fashioned prejudice. But it is enough that the man falls in love like crazy and has to hear the sound of his guts at the same time. The unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the scientific age, suddenly dissipates.
-Her performance is nothing more than a single brusque gesture, with which she reveals her beauty and her youth. At the time when nine suitors knelt in a circle around her, she jealously guarded her nakedness. It is as if the level of shame is intended to express the level of value that your body has.
-Only chance can appear before us as a message. What necessarily happens, what is expected, what is repeated every day, is silent. Only chance speaks to us. We try to read in it as gypsies read the figures formed by the coffee grounds in the bottom of the cup.
-Our daily life is bombarded by chance, more precisely by chance encounters of people and events called coincidences..
-The man, carried away by his sense of beauty, turns a chance event (Beethoven's music, a death in the station) into a motif that now becomes part of the composition of his life. He returns to it, repeats it, varies it, develops it like the composer the theme of his sonata.
-A girl who, instead of reaching "higher", has to serve beer to drunks and on Sundays wash dirty clothes for her brothers accumulates within her a reserve of vitality that people who go to university and could not even dream of. yawn in libraries.
-What is vertigo? The fear of falling? But why does it also give us vertigo in a viewpoint with a secure fence? Vertigo is something different from fear of falling. Vertigo means that the depth that opens before us attracts us, seduces us, awakens in us the desire to fall, from which we defend ourselves in fear..
-WOMAN: being a woman was for Sabina a fate that she had not chosen. That which has not been chosen by us we cannot consider neither as a merit nor as a failure. Sabina believes that we must have a correct relationship with the fate that we have fallen in luck. Rebelling against being born a woman seems just as foolish as taking pride in it.
-FAITHFULNESS AND BETRAYAL: he loved her from childhood until the moment he accompanied her to the cemetery, and he loved her even in memory. Hence the idea that fidelity is the first of all virtues was born in him; fidelity gives unity to our life that would otherwise be fragmented into thousands of passing impressions as if they were thousands of shatters.
-BETRAYAL: from childhood the father and the teacher told us that it is the worst thing that can be imagined. But what is treason? Treason means abandoning one's ranks. Betrayal means leaving your own ranks and going into the unknown. Sabina knows nothing more beautiful than going into the unknown.
-DEMONSTRATIONS: in Italy or France things are simple. When parents force someone to go to church, they take revenge by joining the party (communist, Maoist, Trotskyist, etc.). But her father first made Sabina go to church and then, out of fear, he himself forced her to join the Union of Young Communists.
-LIVING IN THE TRUTH: this is a formula that Kafka uses in his journal or in a letter. Franz no longer remembers where. That formula caught his attention. What is that to live in the truth? The negative definition is simple: it means not lying, not hiding, not keeping anything secret..
-A vital drama can always be expressed through a metaphor referring to weight. We say that the weight of events falls on the person. The person bears that load or does not bear it, falls under its weight, gains or loses.
-What is your weapon? Only his fidelity. He offered it to her from the beginning, from day one, as if he knew he had nothing else to give her. The love between them is strangely asymmetrical in architecture: it rests on the absolute security of their fidelity like a mammoth palace on a single column.
-People, for the most part, flee from their sorrows into the future. They imagine, in the course of time, a line beyond which their current sorrows will cease to exist.
-For those who believe that communist regimes in Central Europe are exclusively the product of criminal beings, an essential question escapes them: those who created these criminal regimes were not the criminals, but the enthusiasts, convinced that they had discovered the only path that leads to Paradise.
-The unique character of the "I" is hidden precisely in what is unimaginable in man. We are only able to imagine what is the same in all people, generally. The individual "I" is that which differs from the general, that is, that which cannot be guessed and calculated in advance, what in the other it is necessary to discover, reveal, conquer.
-Among the men who go after many women we can easily distinguish two categories. Some seek in all women their own subjective and always the same dream about women. The seconds are driven by the desire to seize the infinite variety of the objective world of women..
-The curious disproportions of the woman like a giraffe and a stork continued to excite him when he remembered her: flirtatiousness coupled with clumsiness; sincere sexual desire complemented by a wry smile; the conventional vulgarity of the house and the unconventionality of its owner. What will it be like when they make love? He tried to imagine it but it wasn't easy. He spent several days without thinking of anything else.
-In the universe there is a planet on which all people will be born a second time. They will then have full awareness of the life they led on earth, of all the experiences they acquired there..
-Reprobation and privilege, happiness and unhappiness, no one felt in a more concrete way to what extent these opposites are interchangeable and to what extent there is only one step from one pole of human existence to the other..
-Shit is a more complex theological problem than evil. God gave men freedom and that is why we can assume that after all he is not responsible for human crimes. But the only one responsible for the shit is the one who created man.
-The dispute between those who affirm that the world was created by God and those who think that it arose by itself refers to something that exceeds the possibilities of our reason and our experience. Much more real is the difference that divides those who doubt about the being that was given to man (by whoever he was and in whatever form) and those who unconditionally agree with him..
-Nobody knows it better than politicians. When there is a camera nearby, they immediately run to the nearest child to pick him up and kiss his cheek. Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians, of all political parties and of all movements.
-We all need someone to look at us. It would be possible to divide ourselves into four categories, according to the type of gaze under which we want to live.
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