Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.
You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.
When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring--it was peace.
Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.
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.
The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
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.
A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.
There is no perfection only life
She loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.
A single metaphor can give birth to love.
I want you to be weak. As weak as I am.
And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
The only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other.
Loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.
Oh lovers! be careful in those dangerous first days! once you've brought breakfast in bed you'll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.
And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.
Flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.
Physical love is unthinkable without violence.
Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.
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.
I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be.
Living is being happy: seeing, hearing, touching, drinking, eating, urinating, defecating, diving into the water and gazing at the sky, laughing and crying.
Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said. Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly.
To laugh is to live profoundly.
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting
A man is responsible for his ignorance.
Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death.
Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.
Fortunately women have the miraculous ability to change the meaning of their actions after the event.
Kitsch is the inability to admit that shit exists
On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.
Happiness is the longing for repetition.
The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.
The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.
Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.
Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.
To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.
But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?
, apart from its inconvenience there's even something touching about it. )
Jealousy isn't a pleasant quality, but if it isn't overdone (and if it's combined with modesty), apart from its inconvenience there's even something touching about it.
, we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding. )
Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.
I have no mission. No one has.
The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.
Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test…consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.
Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
I have a strong will to love you for eternity.
Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.
A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.
Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.
In Tereza's eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood
I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them; I have nothing in common with them.
Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.
Once her love had been publicized, it would gain weight, become a burden.
The moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies…
Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
Solitude: a sweet absence of looks.
The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.
[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.
The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.
Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.
Love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.
Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.
Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.
The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.
...because love is continual interrogation. I don't know of a better definition of love.
Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.
Because to live in a world in which no one is forgiven, where all are irredeemable, is the same as living in hell.
Yes, if you're looking for infinity, just close your eyes!
She is sadder and sadder, and for a man there is no balm more soothing than the sadness he has caused a woman.
She loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It differentiated her from the others
