Milan Kundera: Without a little bit of madness, life isn't worth living

Speed is the form of surprise, which is the gift of the technological revolution to people.

Runners, contrary to motorcyclists, always have their own presence, and always have to think of blisters and gasps on their feet: when he runs, he feels his weight, his age, and he is more aware of himself and years than ever.

When people entrust speed performance to a machine, everything changes:

From this point on, the body has been left to an invisible, immaterial speed, pure speed, real speed, amazing speed.

How did the slow fun get lost?

Ah, where are the idle people of ancient times?

Where are the idle heroes in the folk song tune, these homeless people who roam the mills and spend the night in the open air, where are they?

Have they disappeared along with country lanes, grasslands, woodland clearings, and nature?

There is a Czech proverb used to compare their sweet leisurely life:

They gazed out the window of a merciful God.

He who gazes at the window of a merciful God does not get bored;

He is happy.

In our world, leisure degenerates into idleness, which is another matter, and the idle man is the lost man, who is tired and always looking for the action he lacks.

Excerpt from Milan Kundera's Slow, translated by Ma Zhencheng, Shanghai Translation Publishing House.

Meeting is a matter of two people, leaving is a decision of one person, meeting is a beginning, leaving is to meet the next departure. It's a world of pops to leave, but neither of us is good at saying goodbye.

Never think that we can escape, that every step we take determines the final outcome, that our footsteps are moving towards the end of our own choosing.

Ever since God split man in two, all this half has been roaming the world looking for the other half. Love is the half of ourselves that we crave and lose. And love means the dissolution of the force, which is wider and broader than love.

Once love is made public, it becomes heavy and becomes a burden.

Without a little madness, life is not worth living. Listen to the voice of the heart, why should we fry each of our actions like a piece of cake on the pan of reason?

The worst thing is not that the world is not free enough, but that humanity has forgotten freedom.

As soon as man thinks, God laughs. For the more one thinks, the farther the truth is from him. Because people have never been like who he imagined himself. Thinking is never a cause of progress. The purpose of thinking is to identify one's own weaknesses and correct them in practice. Thinking too much and not doing it, or pretending to accept it without thinking, is why God laughs, because this kind of thinking is called self-deception.

What cannot be endured in life is not existence, but the inability to discover the self and become the self.

We often feel the hardship and heaviness of life, and have witnessed the distortion and deformation of life under various pressures countless times, and "ordinary" has become people's most sincere desire for a while. However, we inadvertently miss another kind of fear - no expectation, no peace without giving, and even the emptiness of desire, which is actually another kind of consumption of the vitality and spirit of life.

The essence of shame is not our personal mistakes, but the shame of being seen by others.

When living elsewhere, it is a dream, it is art, it is poetry, and when it is elsewhere, the sense of sublimeness becomes the other side of life: cruelty.

I have always believed that words are slow history, and that true literature is not meant to make our lives faster, but to keep the slowness of life from being lost.

Only when a person is old can he have no scruples about the people around him, the public, and the future.

Two people always need to be close to each other and transcend some kind of opposite sex, and the moment of embracing is intoxicating because it can only be a moment.

Betrayal is to get out of one's own position, and betrayal is to get rid of the original taste and throw yourself into the unknown.

Kitsch is a transit point between existence and oblivion.

A woman cannot respect a man who loves to lie.

It is impossible to relive love like re-reading a book or re-watching a movie.

Love means either getting everything or nothing. Love is complete, otherwise it would not exist. I'm here, he's on the other side. You have to be on my side, not in the middle.

Everyone regretted that he could not live the rest of his life. You will also want to live all your unrealized possibilities, all your possible lives.

People continue to grow old, the end of life is approaching, every moment becomes more and more precious, and there is no time to waste on the past.

Youth is terrible: it is a stage; some children, with thick-soled boots and running around in all kinds of costumes, copy many routines that they seem to understand and learn from others, but they are very enthusiastic about them.

No one wants to stay anywhere for long, and once people stay in one place, they plan to leave immediately, which gives our lives an ideal rhythm.

Human time does not rotate in a cycle, but in a straight line. That's why it's impossible for humans to be happy, happiness is the desire for repetition.

We experience everything that comes to life suddenly, defenseless, like an actor entering the first row. If the first rehearsal in life is life itself, what is the value of life?

Chance often has such magic, but necessity does not. For an unforgettable love, serendipitous coincidences must come together at the first moment, like birds flying together on the shoulders of St. Francis of Assisi.

Life is like composing music, under the guidance of beauty, people turn accidental events into a theme, and then record them in the music of life. Just as a composer composes the main melody of a sonata, the theme of life is also repeated, repeated, revised, and extended.