If you’re to ask me what are my two favourite books of all time it will be Milan Kundera‘s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry‘s The Little Prince. I love The Unbearable Lightness of Being so much and kind of regret not bringing my copy with me but it’s OK.
Here are my favorites from it:
Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.
A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it.
The senator had only one argument in his favour: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.
How did the senator know that children meant happiness? Could he see into their souls? What if the moment they were out of sight, three of them jumped the fourth and began beating him up?
Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).
More highlights…
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.
But was it love? The feeling of wanting to die beside her was clearly exaggerated: he had seen her only once before in his life! Was it simply hysteria of a man who, aware deep down of his in aptitude for love, felt the self-deluding need to simulate it? His unconscious was so cowardly that the best partner it could choose for its little comedy was this miserable provincial waitress with practically no chance at all to enter his life.
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.
What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.
…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…
Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. Flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee. Rule of Threes
Either you see a woman three times in quick succession and then never again, or you maintain relations over the years but make sure that the rendezvous is at least three weeks apart. Four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under. First: look of the public second: to be looked at by many known eyes; happier than the first. Third: people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love; dangerous
Fourth: rarest; people who line in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present; dreamers True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.