quotes by Václav Havel

"“Hope is not a feeling of certainty that everything ends well. Hope is just a feeling that life and work have a meaning.” "
— Václav Havel

"Keep the company of those who seek the truth- run from those who have found it"
— Václav Havel

""Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.""
— Václav Havel

""You can't spend your whole life criticizing something and then, when you have the chance to do it better, refuse to go near it." "
— Václav Havel

"Man is not an omipotent master of the universe, allowed to do with impunity whatever he thinks, or whatever suits him at the moment. The world we live in is made of an immensely complex and mysterious tissue about which we know very little and which we must treat with utmost humility."
— Václav Havel

"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."
— Václav Havel

"The truth is not simply what you think it is; it is also the circumstances in which it is said, and to whom, why, and how it is said."
— Václav Havel

"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."
— Václav Havel

""The real test of a man is not when he plays the role that he wants for himself but when he plays the role destiny has for him.""
— Václav Havel

"There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side."
— Václav Havel

"This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something truly new and unique...something truly historical, in the sense that history again demands to be heard."
— Václav Havel

"You do not become a ''dissident'' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society."
— Václav Havel

"There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause."
— Václav Havel (Summer Meditations)

"(about communism) "we are all involved: those who have created, in a greater or smaller way, this scheme, those who accepted in silence and all those who have become used to it subconsciously”"
— Václav Havel (Vaclav Havel '94)

"All human suffering concerns each human being"
— Václav Havel

"At one time, the state of culture in Czechoslovakia was described, rather poignantly, as a 'Biafra of the spirit'. . . I simply do not believe that we have all lain down and died. I see far more than graves and tombstones around me. I see evidence of this in . . . expensive books on astronomy printed in a hundred thousand copies (they would hardly find that many readers in the USA) . . ."
— Václav Havel

""we are all involved: those who have created, in a greater or smaller way, this scheme, those who accepted in silence and all those who have become used to it subconsciously”"
— Václav Havel