And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.

This line is associated with Milan Kundera’s novelistic meditation on time, memory, and “eternal return,” themes he develops most famously in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (first published in 1984). Writing as a Czech émigré in France, Kundera often contrasts the human desire to relive moments—love, youth, certainty—with the irreversible forward motion of lived time. In the novel’s reflective, essay-like passages, he uses philosophical ideas (notably Nietzsche’s eternal return) to frame the emotional predicament of modern individuals: life happens once, cannot be repeated, and therefore cannot be fully verified or redeemed by a second attempt.

Kundera suggests that a central human suffering comes from the mismatch between desire and temporality. We crave repetition because repetition promises confirmation: if a moment could recur, it could be perfected, understood, or made secure. But time’s linearity makes experience unrepeatable, so happiness—imagined as the return of what we loved—becomes structurally impossible to sustain. The statement also implies that nostalgia is not merely sentimentality but a metaphysical hunger for recurrence. By defining happiness as “longing for repetition,” Kundera reframes happiness less as a stable state than as a wish directed backward, toward the possibility of reliving what time has already carried away.