10 unforgettable phrases from The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Milan Kundera He is one of those writers who, after reading, is never forgotten.. All of his works have great depth and wit. Proof of this are the unforgettable phrases of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, one of his most emblematic works. They have been compiled hundreds of times and always surprise.

What makes the phrases of The Unbearable Lightness of Being It is the lucidity and precision with which they are formulated. This is a love novel, but at the same time it is much more than that. At its core, it is about what all great works talk about: the meaning of life..

Is not easy make a selection of phrases The Unbearable Lightness of Being. However, we have tried to collect the most significant ones. Those that capture the essence of that extraordinary novel, which you cannot stop reading. These are 10 of those statements.

Two nice phrases from The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Almost all the phrases of The Unbearable Lightness of Being They refer to love and its vicissitudes. The novel captures many of the forms that a loving relationship can take. He tries, repeatedly, to define love.

As in this statement: “Love It is not manifested in the desire to sleep with someone (this desire occurs in relation to a countless number of women), but in the desire to sleep next to someone (this desire occurs in relation to a single woman)”.

With this phrase, the author reflects that love goes much more than carnal desire. Well, the latter can manifest itself towards anyone. Instead, love implies presence. When you love someone you enjoy their company.

Likewise, Milan Kundera strives in the work to define what love is not. His sharp reflections on the matter lead him to establish the great contrast between loving and wanting to be loved. It is summarized in this text: “it’s possible that we are not capable of loving precisely because we want to be loved because we want the other to give us something (love), instead of approaching him without demands and wanting only his mere presence”.

In this case, Kundera is doing the distinction between love and dependence. The latter occurs when we need the other to fill our emotional shortcomings. Thus, we constantly fear that the other person will leave us and we allow our well-being to depend absolutely on the signs of affection they have towards us.

Instead, love does not demand, it is freedom. In order to love it is necessary that we love ourselves. In this way, we will not be looking in others for what we ourselves are capable of providing.

Love and the end of love

The phrases of The Unbearable Lightness of Being They do not revolve around romantic love as such. What Kundera does is try to link that feeling with the meaning of life for contemporary man. Hence the end of love is also present in his reflections. This is one of them: “Loves are like empires: when the idea on which they were built disappears, they too perish.”.

In another of his reflections he describes love and the end of love in a very interesting and profound way. It states that love lives precisely because the possibility of its absence is also present..

He says it like this: “That sadness meant: we have reached the last station. That happiness meant: we are together. Sadness was the form and happiness, the content. Happiness filled the space of sadness”.

Give up force and reason

For Kundera, love also implies renunciations. Not exactly the renunciation that fidelity implies, nor that which proposes renouncing one’s own good for the good of others. He puts it this way: “Because loving means giving up strength”. In other words, love establishes and survives from fragility. From the willingness to be vulnerable and accept the vulnerability of the other.

With a certain touch of irony, Kundera also speaks of another renunciation based on love: that of reason. One of the phrases of The Unbearable Lightness of Being says: “Where the heart speaks, it is rude for reason to contradict it.”.

With these words the author reflects those occasions where the mind puts obstacles in our way, because it gets caught up in the logic of fear or prudence. Staying in our comfort zone. Sometimes, it is necessary to listen to our passions, since there are times when they are not wrong.

The weight and lightness

The entire plot of The Unbearable Lightness of Being revolves around the concepts of lightness and weight. Throughout the work, time and again, he questions which of these two axes should govern life. In this regard it is noted: “The heaviest burden is therefore, at the same time, the image of the most intense fullness of life. . The heavier the burden, the more grounded our life will be, the more real and true it will be.”.

It is a statement that, in one way or another, challenges the current idea that frivolity and superficiality are easier to cope with. On the contrary, carrying a burden makes life more real and more worth living.

However, the above does not exclude that weight also implies suffering. This is how he expresses it in this fragment: “There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain is as heavy as the pain felt with someone, by someone, for someone. multiplied by the imagination, prolonged in a thousand echoes”.

According to Kundera, other people’s pain becomes harder than your own. Love makes this so. Compassion is a great weight because it is an unsolvable pain. We may be able to deal with our own suffering, but that of others belongs to them, even if it hurts just as much.

live only once

Many of Milan Kundera’s reflections aim to reveal truths that are obvious, but that we often overlook. How are you doing: “Man can never know what he should want, because he lives only one life and has no way of comparing it with his previous lives or of amending it in his later lives”.

It is a logical reasoning in which the idea that every human being must have a “why” is destroyed. What it suggests is that it is impossible to know, since we always live groping and we only know life itself, by living it. The same idea is repeated in this lapidary phrase: “Life is a sketch for nothing, a draft without a picture”.

In this way, it also emphasizes that it is okay to make mistakes. Nobody has a manual that reflects the correct way to live. Life is lived as you learn, while the ideal is to enjoy it. Well, there’s only one.

Undoubtedly, The Unbearable Lightness of Being It is one of those works that are destined to last. It reveals a writer with enormous sensitivity, who has been able to treat with intelligence and depth one of the eternal themes: love.

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