Case Martin

“Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass; whole centuries and millennia will therefore fall away, centuries of paintings and music, centuries of discoveries, of battles, of books, and this will be dire, because man will lose the notion of his self, and his history, unfathomable, unencompassable, will shrivel into a few schematic signs destitute of all sense.”
― Milan Kundera, The Joke

“Every true artist does feel consciously or unconsciously that he is touching transcendental truths, shadows of things seen through the veil.
In other words, the natural mystic does know that there is something there, something behind the clouds, or within the trees.
But he believes that the pursuit of beauty is how to find it and that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“I have always liked people who can't adapt themselves to life pragmatically.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

“A person is nothing but his image. Philosophers can tell us that it doesn't matter what the world thinks of us, that nothing matters but what we really are. But philosophers don't understand anything. As long as we live with other people, we are only what other people consider us to be. Thinking about how others see us and trying to make our image as attractive as possible is considered a kind of dissembling or cheating. But does there exist another kind of direct contact between my self and their selves except through the mediation of the eyes? Can we possibly imagine love without anxiously following our image in the mind of the beloved? When we are no longer interested in how we are seen by the person we love, it means we no longer love.”
― Milan Kundera, Immortality