The Unbearable Lightness of Being By: Milan Kundera PART ONE: Lightness and Weight

• everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum!
• nonexistence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.
  
• in the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make.
  
• the heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.
  
• 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.
  
• if we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
  
• metaphors are dangerous. metaphors are not to be lifted with. a single metaphor can give birth to love.
  
• in his arms she would fall asleep no matter how wrought up she might have been.
  
• 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).
  
• "compassion" generally inspires suspicion; it designates what is considered an inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. to love someone out of compassion means not really to love.
  
• to have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with the other's misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion -- joy, anxiety, happiness, pain.
  
• maximal capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional telepathy. in the hierarchy of sentiments, then, it is supreme.
  
• a person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.
  those years were more attractive in retrospect than they were when he was living them.
  
• for there is nothing heavier than compassion. not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
  
• necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.
  
• we believe that the greatness of man stems from the fact that he bears his fate as Atlas bore the heavens on his shoulders. beethoven's hero is a lifter of metaphysical weights.
  
• we all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same;