Milan Kundera
«El hombre atraviesa el presente con los ojos vendados. Sólo puede intuir y adivinar lo que de verdad está viviendo. Y después, cuando le quitan la venda de los ojos, puede mirar al pasado y comprobar qué es lo que ha vivido y cuál era su sentido.»
«El sentido de la vida consiste en divertirse viviendo y que, si la vida es demasiado holgazana para que eso sea posible, no hay más remedio que darle un empujoncito. Uno debe cabalgar permanentemente a lomos de las historias, esos potros raudos sin los cuales se arrastraría uno por el polvo como un peón aburrido.»
«Es inútil pretender atacar con razonamientos el firme muro de sentimientos irracionales con los que, al parecer, está modelada el alma de la mujer.»
«..la vida individual de los seres humanos imita la historia de los seres humanos; al comienzo está sumergida en una inmóvil lentitud y luego, poco a poco, se va acelerando cada vez más.»
«Cuando crees en algo al pie de la letra, terminas por exagerar las cosas ad absurdum. El verdadero partidario de determinada política nunca se toma en serio sus sofismas, sino tan sólo los objetivos prácticos que se ocultan tras estos sofismas.»
«...no es tan difícil seducir a una chica como, si tenemos unas elevadas exigencias cuantitativas en este sentido, conocer siempre a una cantidad suficiente de chicas a las que hasta ahora no hemos seducido.
Por eso es necesario siempre, en cualquier sitio y en cualquier situación, llevar a cabo un amplio registro, es decir apuntar, en un libro de notas o en la memoria, los nombres de las mujeres que han llamado nuestra atención y con las que alguna vez podríamos contactar.
El contacto ya es un nivel más elevado de actividad e implica que establecemos con determinada mujer una relación, que la conocemos, que logramos tener acceso a ella.
Si uno disfruta mirando hacia atrás para vanagloriarse, pone el acento en los nombres de las mujeres amadas; pero si mira hacia delante, hacia el futuro, debe preocuparse, sobre todo, de tener a suficientes mujeres registradas y contactadas.»
«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.»
«Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.»
«No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.»
«There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.»
«Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.»
«Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. 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.»
«Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.»
«Love is a desire for that lost half of ourselves.»
«Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.»
«When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.»
«Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.»
«The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse. Yes, the right to kill a deer or a cow is the only thing all of mankind can agree upon, even during the bloodiest of wars.»
«Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.»
«Until that time, her betrayals had filled her with excitement and joy, because they opened up new paths to new adventures of betrayal. But what if the paths came to an end? One could betray one's parents, husband, country, love, but when parents, husband, country, and love were gone - what was left to betray?»
«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?»
Lunch with IMAT classmates and Knaus sensei...
Afternoon visitor...
Innocent nocturnal activities...
Night view of Beppu...
Korean cookmaster (Johnatan)...
Worshipping of the Kimchi (featuring Philipp, Germanic Great Priest of the Holy Kimchi)...
How APU dormitories (APHouse) looks like...
Beppu from my window (if I stand in the fence)...
View from the cafeteria...
Takoyaki bunch (featuring Ken-chan and Dragonball Z)...
Sister Joy finally arrived... Thanks Korean maffiosi (Johnatan and Joseph) for you help!!!
Chinese girls from my window...
Joy welkomen...
Computer otaku...
Sunday: stairway to heaven or to the highway bus stop?
APU, main buildings....
Look, mama, Im here!
APU surroundings...
Bridge connecting APU with APU House... 
Dinner with the IMAT gang: preparation... 
Joy and Nina... 
IMAT gang baccanale...
Post festum...
How my name (Shinji) looks like in Japanese... Meaning: new samurai! 
Thanks Yuki-chan and Mi-chan...
And for a perfect sunday ending, I received phone call from my dear friend Hung the Vietnamese P.I.M.P.
