The most famous quotes from The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The top 3 according to 213 votes from people: And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? · To love someone out of compassion means not really to love. · Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.. (Updated Aug 19, 2021.)
The first rehearsal for life that is life itself, love as the longing for our lost half and kitsch as the stopover between being and oblivion: the most quoted lines of Milan Kundera's novel, with the part of the book they come from.
Top 14
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1
And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
Part One: Lightness and Weight.
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2
To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.
Part One: Lightness and Weight.
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3
Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.
Part One: Lightness and Weight.
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4
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.
Part One: Lightness and Weight.
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5
Chance and chance alone has a message for us.
Part Two: Soul and Body.
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6
Vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us…
Part Two: Soul and Body.
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7
Love means renouncing strength.
Franz. Part Three: Words Misunderstood.
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8
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…
Part One: Lightness and Weight.
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9
Necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.
Part One: Lightness and Weight.
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10
Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
Part Five: Lightness and Weight.
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11
When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
Part Six: The Grand March.
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12
Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.
Part Six: The Grand March.
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13
Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.
On Sabina. Part Three: Words Misunderstood.
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14
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.
Part Seven: Karenin's Smile.
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