10 Unforgettable Sentences From “The Unbearable Lightness Of Being”
Milan Kundera is one of those writers who, once discovered, leave a mark on us and are never forgotten. All his works are endowed with great depth and ingenuity. The proof of this lies in the unforgettable sentences of The unbearable lightness of being ; one of his most emblematic works. These sentences have been compiled hundreds of times and they continue to surprise.
What makes the sentences of The unbearable lightness of being memorable is the lucidity and precision with which they are formulated. This work is a romance novel, but it is fundamentally much more than that. It deals in fact with a subject common to all great works: the meaning of life.
It is not easy to make a selection of the sentences of The unbearable lightness of being. However, we have tried to bring together the most significant. These are the ones that convey the essence of this extraordinary novel, the ones you can’t stop reading. Here are the 10 selected sentences.
Two magnificent sentences from The unbearable lightness of being
Almost all the sentences in The unbearable lightness of being refer to love and its vicissitudes. The novel reflects the different forms that a romantic relationship can take. In fact, he tries on different occasions to define love.
As for example in this statement: ” Love does not manifest itself in the desire to lie down with someone (this desire occurs in a relationship with a large number of women), but in the desire to sleep alongside. of someone (this desire occurs in a relationship with a single woman) ”.
Also, Milan Kundera strives in the work to define what is not love. His keen reflections on this subject lead him to establish a great contrast between loving and desiring to be loved. This reflection is synthesized in this text: “ It is possible not to be able to love precisely because we want to be loved, because we want the other to give us something (love), instead of bringing us closer to him without requirements and purely and simply wishing his presence ”.
Love and the end of love
The phrases of the Insufferable Lightness of Being do not revolve around romantic love as such. Kundera attempts to link this feeling with the meaning of life associated with contemporary man. From there, the end of love is a subject present in his reflections. Here is one of them: ” Loves are like empires: when the idea on which they were built disappears, they also perish .”
In other reflections he describes love and the end of love in a very interesting and profound way. He puts forward the fact that love lives precisely because the possibility of its absence exists.
He puts it this way: “ This sadness meant: we have reached the last season. This happiness meant: we are together. Sadness was the form and happiness was the content. Happiness filled the space with sadness ”.
Renounce strength and reason
For Kundera, love also involves renunciations. But it does not refer exactly to the renunciation which implies fidelity, nor to that which proposes to give up personal well-being according to the well-being of the other. The author puts it this way: ” For to love means to renounce strength “. In other words, love sets in and survives from fragility, from the willingness to be vulnerable and to accept the vulnerability of the other.
With a certain tone of irony, Kundera evokes another renunciation made as a consequence of love: that of reason. One of the phrases of the Unbearable Lightness of Being is the following: ” Where the heart speaks, it is rude that reason contradicts it “. With this he wants to signal the fact that what is in feelings is more secure and relevant, than what is in thoughts.
Weight and lightness
The whole framework of the unbearable lightness of being revolves around the concepts of lightness and weight. Throughout the work, once and then another, one wonders whether one of these two axes should govern life. On this subject, we can read: “ The heaviest weight is, at the same time, the image of the most intense fullness of life. The heavier the load, the lower our life will be, and the more real and true it will be ”.
It’s an assertion that somehow questions the current idea that frivolity and superficiality are easier to tackle. On the contrary, having to carry a load makes life more real and more worth living.
On the other hand, the previous explanation does not exclude the fact that the weight also involves suffering. So he explains it in this quote “ There is nothing heavier than compassion. Even personal pain is not so heavy as the pain felt with someone, by someone, for someone, multiplied by the imagination, prolonged by thousands of echoes. “
According to Kundera, the pain of others manages to be harder than personal pain. Love makes it so. Compassion is a great burden because the pain is incurable. We may be able to cope with our own suffering, but that of others is theirs, although it also causes us pain.
Only live once
Many thoughts of Milan Kundera reveal truths which are nevertheless obvious, but which are sometimes overlooked. This is a good example: ” Man can never know that he must love, because he only lives one life and has no means of comparing it with his previous lives or of sending it back to these. later lives ”.
It is a logical reasoning in which this idea that every human being must have “a why” is destroyed. The author explains that it is impossible to know, because we always live by feeling our way and we only know life by living it. The same idea is repeated in this sentence: ” Life is a sketch for nothing, an eraser without a frame “
Without a doubt, The unbearable lightness of being is one of those works that are destined to endure. In her is revealed a writer endowed with an enormous sensitivity who knew how to treat with intelligence and depth one of the most eternal subjects: love.
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