Milan Kundera Quotes on Psychology

13 quotes

  1. He had spent seven years of his life with Tereza, and now he realised that those years were more attractive in retrospect than they were when he was living them.

  2. 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, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.

  3. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of great distress..

  4. Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect some day to suffer vertigo.

  5. No, vertigo is somethng other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is thedesire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

  6. Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.

  7. What is unique about the 'I' hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual 'I' is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.

  8. The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful.

  9. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

  10. This is the real and the only reason for friendship: to provide a mirror so the other person can contemplate his image from the past, which, without the eternal blah-blah of memories between pals, would long ago have disappeared.

  11. Pain doesn't listen to reason, it has it's own reason, which is not reasonable.

  12. As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom.

  13. She said: 'I get scared when my eye blinks. Scared that during that second when my gaze is switched off, a snake or a rat or another man could slip into your place.'

All Milan Kundera quotes