Andy Johnson > Andy's Quotes

“Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.”
― Milan Kundera

“(existential mathematics...) the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.” –p. 39”
― Milan Kundera

“Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper (it cannot fail to be), but it doesn't count for much unless a more basic critique precedes it: a critique of human memory as such. For after all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap of the past, and no one knows why just this scrap and not some other one, since in each of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside our will or our interests. We won't understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed. Even the most voluminous archives cannot help.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“Is not parody the eternal lot of man?”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“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

“Metaphors are dangerous, Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.”
― Milan Kundera

“Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“Is goodwill so fragile, so precarious a thing, then? (Of course, dear fellow, of course)”
― Milan Kundera, Slowness

“The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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

“Then came time for her to marry. She had nine suitors. They all knelt round her in a circle. Standing in the middle like a princess, she did not know which one to choose: one was the handsomest, another the wittiest, the third was the richest, the fourth was most athletic, the fifth from the best family, the sixth recited verse, the seventh traveled widely, the eighth played the violin, and the ninth was the most manly. But they all knelt in the same way, they all had the same calluses on their knees.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“All the basic situations in life occur only once, never to return. For a man to be a man, he must be fully aware of this never-to-return. Drink it to the dregs. No cheating allowed. No making believe it's not there. Modern man cheats. He tries to get around all the milestones on the road from birth to death.”
― Milan Kundera, The Joke

“Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them 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

“That is when I understood the magical meaning of the circle. If you go away from a row, you can still come back into it. A row is an open formation. But a circle closes up, and if you go away from it, there is no way back. It is not by chance that the planets move in circles and that a rock coming loose from one of them goes inexorably away, carried off by centrifugal force. Like a meteorite broken off from a planet, I left the circle and have not stopped falling. Some people are granted their death as they are whirling around, and others are smashed at the end of their fall. And these others (I am one of them) always retain a kind of faint yearning for that lost ring dance, because we are all inhabitants of a universe where everything turns in circles.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“Perhaps I love you. Perhaps I love you very much. But probably just for this reason it would be better if we remain as we are. I think a man and a woman love each other all the more when they don't live together and when they know about each other only that they exist, and when they are grateful to each other for the fact that they exist and that they know they exist. And that alone is enough for their happiness.”
― Milan Kundera

“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 the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the ground for nothing, an outline with no picture”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“You've gotta dance like there's nobody watching,
Love like you'll never be hurt,
Sing like there's nobody listening,
And live like it's heaven on earth.”
― William W. Purkey

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
― H. Jackson Brown Jr., P.S. I Love You

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire