Ignorance Quotes

“The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“To die; to decide to die; that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't death strip an adolescent of a far larger portion of future? Certainly it does, but for a young person, the future is a remote, abstract, unreal thing he doesn't really believe in.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“Man can only be certain about the present moment. But is that quite true either? Can he really know the present? Is he in a position to make any judgment about it? Certainly not. For how can a person with no knowledge of the future understand the meaning of the present? If we do not know what future the present is leading us toward, how can we say whether this present is good or bad, whether it deserves our concurrence, or our suspicion, or our hatred?”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“And there lies the horror: the past we remember is devoid of time. Impossible to reexperience a love the way we reread a book or resee a film.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“A person who messes up her goodbyes shouldn't expect much from her reunions.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. To express that fundamental notion most Europeans can utilize a word derived from the Greek (nostalgia, nostalgie) as well as other words with roots in their national languages: añoranza, say the Spaniards; saudade, say the Portuguese. In each language these words have a different semantic nuance. Often they mean only the sadness caused by the impossibility of returning to one's country: a longing for country, for home. What in English is called "homesickness." Or in German: Heimweh. In Dutch: heimwee. But this reduces that great notion to just its spatial element. One of the oldest European languages, Icelandic (like English) makes a distinction between two terms: söknuour: nostalgia in its general sense; and heimprá: longing for the homeland. Czechs have the Greek-derived nostalgie as well as their own noun, stesk, and their own verb; the most moving, Czech expression of love: styska se mi po tobe ("I yearn for you," "I'm nostalgic for you"; "I cannot bear the pain of your absence"). In Spanish añoranza comes from the verb añorar (to feel nostalgia), which comes from the Catalan enyorar, itself derived from the Latin word ignorare (to be unaware of, not know, not experience; to lack or miss), In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don't know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don't know what is happening there. Certain languages have problems with nostalgia: the French can only express it by the noun from the Greek root, and have no verb for it; they can say Je m'ennuie de toi (I miss you), but the word s'ennuyer is weak, cold -- anyhow too light for so grave a feeling. The Germans rarely use the Greek-derived term Nostalgie, and tend to say Sehnsucht in speaking of the desire for an absent thing. But Sehnsucht can refer both to something that has existed and to something that has never existed (a new adventure), and therefore it does not necessarily imply the nostos idea; to include in Sehnsucht the obsession with returning would require adding a complementary phrase: Sehnsucht nach der Vergangenheit, nach der verlorenen Kindheit, nach der ersten Liebe (longing for the past, for lost childhood, for a first love).”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“المصادفات في عمر معين تفقد سحرها، لا تعود تُدهش، وتصبح مبتذلة”
― ميلان كونديرا, الجهل

“We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper (it cannot fail to be), but it doesn't count for much unless a more basic critique precedes it: a critique of human memory as such. For after all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap of the past, and no one knows why just this scrap and not some other one, since in each of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside our will or our interests. We won't understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed. Even the most voluminous archives cannot help.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“En griego, «regreso» se dice nostos. Algos significa “sufrimiento”. La nostalgia es, pues, el sufrimiento causado por el deseo incumplido de regresar. La mayoría de los europeos puede emplear para esta noción fundamental una palabra de origen griego (nostalgia) y, además, otras palabras con raíces en la lengua nacional: en español decimos “añoranza”; en portugués, saudade. En cada lengua estas palabras poseen un matiz semántico distinto. Con frecuencia tan sólo significan la tristeza causada por la imposibilidad de regresar a la propia tierra. Morriña del terruño. Morriña del hogar. En inglés sería homesickness, o en alemán Heimweh, o en holandés heimwee. Pero es una reducción espacial de esa gran noción. El islandés, una de las lenguas europeas más antiguas, distingue claramente dos términos: söknudur: nostalgia en su sentido general; y heimfra: morriña del terruño. Los checos, al lado de la palabra “nostalgia” tomada del griego, tienen para la misma noción su propio sustantivo: stesk, y su propio verbo; una de las frases de amor checas más conmovedoras es styska se mi po tobe: “te añoro; ya no puedo soportar el dolor de tu ausencia”. En español, “añoranza” proviene del verbo “añorar”, que proviene a su vez del catalán enyorar, derivado del verbo latino ignorare (ignorar, no saber de algo). A la luz de esta etimología, la nostalgia se nos revela como el dolor de la ignorancia. Estás lejos, y no sé qué es de ti. Mi país queda lejos, y no sé qué ocurre en él. Algunas lenguas tienen alguna dificultad con la añoranza: los franceses sólo pueden expresarla mediante la palabra de origen griego (nostalgie) y no tienen verbo; pueden decir: je m?ennuie de toi (equivalente a «te echo de menos» o “en falta”), pero esta expresión es endeble, fría, en todo caso demasiado leve para un sentimiento tan grave. Los alemanes emplean pocas veces la palabra “nostalgia” en su forma griega y prefieren decir Sehnsucht: deseo de lo que está ausente; pero Sehnsucht puede aludir tanto a lo que fue como a lo que nunca ha sido (una nueva aventura), por lo que no implica necesariamente la idea de un nostos; para incluir en la Sehnsucht la obsesión del regreso, habría que añadir un complemento: Senhsucht nach der Vergangenheit, nach der verlorenen Kindheit, o nach der ersten Liebe (deseo del pasado, de la infancia perdida o del primer amor).”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“As early as 1930 Schoenberg wrote: "Radio is an enemy, a ruthless enemy marching irresistibly forward, and any resistance is hopeless"; it "force-feeds us music . . . regardless of whether we want to hear it, or whether we can grasp it," with the result that music becomes just noise, a noise among other noises. Radio was the tiny stream it all began with. Then came other technical means for reproducing, proliferating, amplifying sound, and the stream became an enormous river. If in the past people would listen to music out of love for music, nowadays it roars everywhere and all the time, "regardless whether we want to hear it," it roars from loudspeakers, in cars, in restaurants, in elevators, in the streets, in waiting rooms, in gyms, in the earpieces of Walkmans, music rewritten, reorchestrated, abridged, and stretched out, fragments of rock, of jazz, of opera, a flood of everything jumbled together so that we don't know who composed it (music become noise is anonymous), so that we can't tell beginning from end (music become noise has no form): sewage-water music in which music is dying.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“Now time has a very different look; it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future; it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“In Irena’s head the alcohol plays a double role: it frees her fantasy, encourages her boldness, makes her sensual, and at the same time it dims her memory. She makes love wildly, lasciviously, and at the same time the curtain of oblivion wraps her lewdness in an all-concealing darkness. As if a poet were writing his greatest poem with ink that instantly disappears.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“When she is older she will see in these resemblances a regrettable uniformity among individuals (they all stop at the same spots to kiss, have the same tastes in clothing, flatter a woman with the same metaphor) and a tedious monotony among events (they are all just an endless repetition of the same one); but in her adolescence she welcomes these coincidences as miraculous and she is avid to decipher their meanings.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“Remembering now all those farewells (fake farewells, worked-up farewells), Irena thinks: a person who messes up her goodbyes shouldn’t expect much from her re-unions.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don’t know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don’t know what is happening there.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“أتخيل انفعال كائنين يلتقيان بعد سنوات. قديما تعاشرا، فيظنان إذن أنهما مرتبطان بنفس التجربة، بنفس الذكريات. نفس الذكريات؟ هنا يبدأ سوء الفهم: ليس لديهما نفس الذكريات، كلاهما، يحتفظ من لقاءاتهما باثنين أو ثلاثة مواقف صغيرة، لكن لكل منهما ما يخصه منها، ذكرياتهما لا تتشابه، لا تتقاطع، وحتى كميا ليست قابلة للمقارنة: أحدهما يتذكر للآخر أكثر مما يتذكر الآخر هو له، أولا لأن قدرة الذاكرة تختلف من شخص لآخر (مازال هذا تفسيرا مقبولا من كليهما) لكن أيضا (وهذا صعب التسليم به) لأنه ليس لأحدهما لدى الآخر نفس الأهمية. عندما رأت إرينا جوزيه فى المطار، تذكرت كل تفاصيل مغامرتهما السابقة، لم يتذكر جوزيه شيئا. منذ الثانية الأولى يقوم لقاؤهما على عدم مساواة ظالمة ومغيظة”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“That’s another enigma about memory, more basic than all the rest: do recollections have some measurable temporal volume? do they unfold over a span of time? […] And there lies the horror: the past we remember is devoid of time. Impossible to reexperience a moment the way we reread a book or resee a film.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“We won't understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“تختفي الذكريات إذا لم تُستحضر مرة وأخرى في أحاديث الأصدقاء.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“كلما كان الزمن الذي نخلفه وراءنا أكبر كلما أصبح الصوت الذي يحثّنا على العودة لا يُقاوم ، يبدو هذا الحكم مبدءاً عاماً، لكنه مزيف.
فالكائن البشري يشيخ والنهاية تقترب، فتصبح كل لحظة ثمينة ولا يعود هناك وقت يُضيّع على الذكريات.
يجب فهم التناقض الرياضي الظاهري للحنين : يظهر هذا بقوة في مرحلة الشباب الأولى، حين يكون حجم الحياة الماضية زهيداً.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“In Spanish añoranza comes from the verb añorar (to feel nostalgia), which comes from the Catalan enyorar, itself derived from the Latin word ignorare (to be unaware of, not know, not experience; to lack or miss), In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don't know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don't know what is happening there”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“If in the past people would listen to music out of love for music, nowadays it roars everywhere and all the time, "regardless whether we want to hear it", it roars from loudspeakers, in cars, in restaurants, in elevators, in the streets, in waiting rooms, in gyms, in the earpieces of Walkmans, music rewritten, reorchestrated, abridged, and stretched out, fragments of rock, of jazz, of opera, a flood of everything jumbled together so that we don't know who composed it (music become noise is anonymous), so that we can't tell beginning from end (music become noise has no form): sewage-water music in which music is dying.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“All predictions are wrong, that's one of the few certainties granted to mankind.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“روحها فارغة ، خاوية من أي شعور ، تماماً مثل ممثل يلقي نصاً ولا يفكر بما يقول”
― ميلان كونديرا, الجهل

“Everyone is wrong about the future. Man can only be certain about the present moment. But is that quite true either? Can he really know the present? Is he in a position to make any judgment about it? Certainly not. For how can a person with no knowledge of the future understand the meaning of the present? If we do not know what future the present is leading us toward, how can we say whether this present is good or bad, whether it deserves our concurrence, or our suspicion, or our hatred?”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“كان عدم الرضا الذي تشعر به نحو نفسها غير محتمل وأرادت أن تخرج من هذه الحالة بأي ثمن، أرادت أن تدرك عظمةً تمحو صغرها، عظمة ينتهي أمامها بالانحناء، أرادت أن تموت”
― ميلان كونديرا, الجهل

“إذ يستطيع جيشان كبيران أن يتصارعا حتى الموت من أجل قضايا مقدسة، لكن بكتيريا صغيرة ونتنة تقضي دائما على الاثنين.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“During the twenty years of Odesseus' absence, the people of Ithaca retained many recollections of him but never felt nostalgia for him. Whereas Odysseus did suffer nostalgia, and remembered almost nothing.

.....

For four long books of the Odyssey he had retraced in detail his adventures before the dazzled Phaeacians. But in Ithaca he was not a stranger, he was one of their own, so it never occurred to anyone to say, 'Tell us!”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“من يخسر وداعه لا يمكن ان ينتظر من اللقاءات اللاحقة إلا القليل.”
― ميلان كونديرا, Ignorance