10 Unforgettable Quotes From The Unbearable Lightness Of Being
Milan Kundera is one of those authors that you never forget once you’ve read something by him. His books are immensely deep and powerful. The quotes from The Unbearable Lightness of Being (one of his most iconic works) we’ve collected here demonstrate this.
The quotes are so memorable because they are incredibly clear. It’s a novel about love — and at the same time about so much more than that. Ultimately, this story centers on what so many other books deal with: the meaning of life.
There are tons of great quotes from The Unbearable Lightness of Being , but we’ve tried to pick out the most loaded ones. These will capture the heart of this great novel in an intriguing way. Here’s our top ten.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Almost all quotes from The Unbearable Lightness of Being are about love and problems in love. This novel encompasses the many different forms that a romantic relationship can take. It tries to define love.
Milan Kundera also makes an effort to explain to us what love is not . He contrasts loving with wanting to be loved.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being doesn’t really talk about what we normally think of as romantic love. What Kundera does is try to reunite feeling with the meaning of life for modern man.
Here he describes love and the end of love in a very interesting, deep way. He says that love actually lives on because it’s just as possible that it—the love—isn’t there at all from the start.
Renunciation of power and logic
Kundera also thought that love went hand in hand with renunciation, but not the kind you expect from fidelity. Nor was he talking about the kind of renunciation where you neglect your own well-being for someone else.
In other words, love clings to it and survives despite its fragility. It is vulnerable and thus accepts the vulnerability of the other person.
With an ironic twist, Kundera also talks about another kind of renunciation in love, namely the renunciation of logic.
What he means by this is that what your feelings tell you is more true and more important than what is on your mind.
Lightness and heaviness
The entire storyline of The Unbearable Lightness of Being revolves around the concepts of lightness and heaviness. Again and again, Kundera wonders which of the two should rule your life.
It questions the current idea that superficiality is easier to bear. Carrying a heavy burden makes life more real and more valuable.
But that last quote doesn’t mean that heaviness doesn’t cause suffering.
According to Kundera, the pain of others is harder to bear than your own pain and only love can make it go away. Compassion is a heavy burden because it brings a kind of pain that is not easy to get rid of. You may be able to deal with your own suffering, but even if other people’s suffering is theirs alone, it still hurts you.
Only live once
These last two quotes from the Unbearable Lightness of Being are deeper than you might think at first glance.
Logic makes short shrift of the idea that every person should have a ‘why’. What Kundera is saying is that it is impossible to know because we live our lives blindly and can only learn things by living them.
