Famous Quotes & Sayings

Milan Kundera

The heaviest of burdens is simultaneously an image of life's most intense fullfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into new heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?

Milan Kundera

Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest.

Milan Kundera

People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.

Milan Kundera

Mankind's real moral test, a test so radical and so deep that it escapes our gaze, is probably the one of its relations with those that are the most at its mercy; the Animals.

Mike Lazaridis

Try typing a web key on a touchscreen on an Apple iPhone, that's a real challenge. You cannot see what you type.

Mike Mason

Real love is always fated. It has been arranged before time. It is the most meticulously prepared of coincidences. And fate, of course, is simply a secular term for the will of God, and coincidence for His grace.

Mike Lowry

If somebody comes to a neighborhood coffee hour, or goes to a discussion group, and they have a discussion, I do think that people really walk away with a real understanding of the issues.

Mike Lowry

Believing that our greatest need is for the general public to be able to get better information, to have an opportunity to learn better the real issues of the less fortunate, we centered the activities of the Fairness Project on that.

Mike Leigh

I know, that trends and all of those things and formulae that calculate what audiences want to see and what audiences don't want to see and various other demographic demarcations are the eccentric and ludicrous prerogative of Hollywood studios. But out there in the real world - by which I mean the rest of the world where we make truthful organic films, independent films unimpeded by interference - it's not about all those sort of calculating what is commercial. It's about wanting to say things and saying them in a way that will get through to people.

Mike Leigh

When I was young I used to sit in the cinema thinking wouldn't it be great if you could have a film in which the characters were like real people instead of being like actors.

Mike Leigh

I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience.

Miguel de Icaza

There is a point in your life when you realize that you have written enough destructors...

Miep Gies

Real strength is being able to carry on when times are hard,

Miguel Syjuco

We referenced fictional characters as if they were people to learn from. As if real-life people were too nebulous, too private and unreal for us to understand.

Mara Wilson

I thought I started acting at 5 or 6, it was really when they were interviewing real families for a toothpaste commercial. They interviewed our family.

Marcel Proust

Le veritable voyage de decouverte ne consiste pas a chercher de nouveaux paysages, mais a avoir de nouveaux yeux. (The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.)

Marcel Proust

Any mental activity is easy if it need not take reality into account.

Marcel Proust

The soldier is convinced that a certain indefinitely extendable time period is accorded him before he is killed, the burglar before he is caught, men in general, before they must die. That is the amulet which preserves individuals — and sometimes populations — not from danger, but from the fear of danger, in reality from the belief in danger, which in some cases allows them to brave it without being brave. Such a confidence, just as unfounded, supports the lover who counts on a reconciliation, a letter.

Marcel Proust

People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.

Marcel Proust

...that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.

Marcel Proust

Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far.

Marcel Proust

We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.

Marcel Proust

Nous sommes tous oblige s, pour rendre la re alite supportable, d'entretenir en nous quelques petites folies. We must all indulge in a few follies if we are to make reality bearable.

Marcel Proust

... But all the feelings that evoke in us the joy or the misfortune of a real person are only produced in us through the intermediary of an image of that joy or that misfortune; the ingeniousness of the first novelist was in understanding that, in the apparatus of our emotions, since the image is the only essential element, the simplification which consists of purely and simply suppressing the factual characters is a definitive improvement.

Marcel Proust

Under each station of the real, another glimmers.

Marcel Proust

Certain favourite roles are played by us so often before the public and rehearsed so carefully when we are alone that we find it easier to refer to their fictitious testimony than to that of a reality which we have almost entirely forgotten.

Marcel Proust

Existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand.

Marcel Proust

To understand a profound thought is to have, at the moment one understands it, a profound thought oneself; and this demands some effort, a genuine descent to the heart of oneself . . . Only desire and love give us the strength to make this effort. The only books that we truly absorb are those we read with real appetite, after having worked hard to get them, so great had been our need of them.

Marcel Proust

All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.

Marcel Proust

When a belief vanishes, there survives it -- more and more vigorously so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new things -- a fetishistic attachment to the old things which it did once animate, as if it was in them and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause -- the death of the gods.

Marcel Proust

If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.

Joseph Beuys

Truth must be found in reality, not systems.

Joseph B. Wirthlin

There is no real joy that does not involve self-denial and self-discipline