Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the idea that love represents a deep connection to parts of ourselves that we feel incomplete without.
Milan Kundera's quote suggests that love is an essential human experience tied to our sense of identity and wholeness. It emphasizes that in relationships, we often seek to reconnect with the parts of ourselves that have been neglected or lost, portraying love as a journey of rediscovery and unification of self.
In practice
In a Valentine's Day speech to express the deeper meanings of love.
Which doesn't mean, of course, that I'd stopped loving her, that I'd forgotten her, or that her image had paled; on the contrary; in the form of a quiet nostalgia she remained constantly within me; I longed for her as one longs for something definitively lost.
Facts mean little compared to attitudes. To contradict rumor or sentiment is as futile as arguing against a believer's faith in the Immaculate Conception. You have simply become a victim of faith, Comrade Assistant.
While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and sharing motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.
Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.
To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.
Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound.
I was born to join in love, not hate - that is my nature.
He takes her in his arms He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you But he thinks this is a lie, so he says in the end You're dead, nothing can hurt you which seems to him a more promising beginning, more true.
I do not accept any less than someone just as real, as fabulous!
A strange, terrific force unlike anything I've ever experienced is sprouting in my heart, taking root there, growing. Shut up behind my rib cage, my warm heart expands and contracts independent of my will--over and over.
To love someone is to see a miracle invisible to others.
We see his smile of love even when others see nothing but the black hand of death smiting our best beloved.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.