Quotes by Havel, Vaclav




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"Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it. It is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it."

Havel, Vaclav on absurdity
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"Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy."

Havel, Vaclav on decay    Share

"Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."

Havel, Vaclav on hope
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"There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side."

Havel, Vaclav on intelligence and intellectuals    Share

"The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it."

Havel, Vaclav on literature    Share

"I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions."

Havel, Vaclav on literature    Share

"None of us know all the potentialities that slumber in the spirit of the population, or all the ways in which that population can surprise us when there is the right interplay of events."

Havel, Vaclav on masses    Share

"The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning -- in other words, of absurdity --the more energetically meaning is sought."

Havel, Vaclav on life    Share

"True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say?"

Havel, Vaclav on oppression    Share

"The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both."

Havel, Vaclav on power    Share

"If you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become President."

Havel, Vaclav on president    Share

"Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance."

Havel, Vaclav on protest    Share

"As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it."

Havel, Vaclav on reason    Share

"The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility."

Havel, Vaclav on salvation    Share

"Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not."

Havel, Vaclav on humor
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"A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clear-sighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerally of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action."

Havel, Vaclav on action    Share

"Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life."

Havel, Vaclav on suicide
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"Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have -- by disrupting that order -- a way of surprising."

Havel, Vaclav on theater    Share

"I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect."

Havel, Vaclav on theater    Share

"People who live in the post-totalitarian system know only too well that the question of whether one or several political parties are in power, and how these parties define and label themselves, is of far less importance than the question of whether or not it is possible to live like a human being."

Havel, Vaclav on totalitarianism    Share

"There can be no doubt that distrust of words is less harmful than unwarranted trust in them. Besides, to distrust words, and indict them for the horrors that might slumber unobtrusively within them --isn't this, after all, the true vocation of the intellectual?"

Havel, Vaclav on words    Share

"The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive."

Havel, Vaclav on writers and writing    Share

"Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations. Without internal peace, that is, peace among citizens and between the citizens and the state, there can be no guarantee of external peace."

Havel, Vaclav on citizenship    Share

"Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good."

Havel, Vaclav on hope
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