Encounter QUOTES

2 " Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue - perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one. "

― Milan Kundera , Encounter

4 " Art must always stand guard against stirring emotions that lie outside the aesthetic: sexual arousal, terror, disgust, shock. "

― Milan Kundera , Encounter

6 " When his wife was at his side, she was also in front of him, marking out the horizon of his life. Now the horizon is empty: the view has changed. "

― Milan Kundera , Encounter

8 " The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic. "

― Milan Kundera , Encounter

10 " He looks at houses, chateaus, forests, and thinks about the countless generations who used to see those things and who are gone now; and he understands that everything he is seeing is oblivion; pure oblivion, the oblivion whose absolute state will soon be achieved, the moment he himself is gone. And again I think about the obvious idea (that astoundingly obvious idea) that everything that exists (nation, thought, music) can also not exist. "

― Milan Kundera , Encounter

12 " It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth. "

― Milan Kundera , Encounter

14 " ذلك أن شغف المعرفة عند الروائي لا يستهدف السياسة ولا التاريخ. ما الجديد الذي بإمكان روائي أن يكتشفه حول الأحداث الموصوفة والمناقشة في آلاف الكتب الرصينة المتنوعة؟ "

― Milan Kundera , Encounter

16 " The novel was born with the Modern Era, which made man, to quote Heidegger, the "only real subject," the ground for everything. It is largely through the novel that man as an individual was established on the European scene. Away from the novel, in our real lives, we know very little about our parents as they were before our birth; we have only fragmentary knowledge of the people close to us: we see them come and go and scarcely have they vanished than their place is taken over by others: they form a long line of replaceable beings. Only the novel separates out an individual, trains a light on his biography, his ideas, his feelings, makes him irreplaceable: makes him the center of everything. "

― Milan Kundera , Encounter

18 " Bacon's portraits are an interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved person still remain a beloved person? For how long does a cherished face growing remote through illness, through madness, through hatred, through death still remain recognizable? Where is the border beyond which a self ceases to be a self? "

― Milan Kundera , Encounter

20 " The formal innovations of the great masters always have a certain discreetness about them; such is true perfection; only among the small masters does novelty seek to call attention to itself. "

― Milan Kundera , Encounter