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They love their bodies. We neglected ours. They love to travel. We stayed put. They love adventure. We lived our lives at meetings. They love jazz. We insipidly imitated folk music. They're devoted to themselves. We wanted to save the world. With our messia-nism we nearly destroyed it. Maybe they with their selfishness will save it."

Every generation has its own set of passions, loves, and interests, which it professes with a certain tenacity, to differentiate it from older generations and to confirm itself in its uniqueness.

Such hatreds are beyond human capacity, and so man, if he wishes to relieve his anger (aware as he is of its limited power) concentrates it on a single individual.

Man, this being pining for equilibrium, balances the weight of the evil piled on his back with the weight of his hatred. But try directing your hatred at mere abstract principles, at injustice, fanaticism, cruelty, or, if you've managed to find the human principle itself hateful, then try hating mankind!

is it a survival of some old pagan superstition according to which transvestism offers protection from evil spirits?

A wave of anger washed over me, anger against myself, at my age at the time, that stupid lyrical age, when a man is too great a riddle to himself to be interested in the riddles outside himself and when other people (no matter how dear) are mere walking mirrors in which he is amazed to find his own emotions, his own worth.

I am not on your side in your quarrel with the Party, Ludvik, because I know that great things on this earth can be created only by a community of infinitely devoted men who humbly give up their lives to a higher design.

no great movement designed to change the world can bear sarcasm or mockery, because they are a rust that corrodes all it touches.

Let our opponents do the dirty work themselves! Why make their consciences any easier?

The planet we inhabit is a borderland between heaven and hell. No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad.

Because to live in a world in which no one is forgiven, where all are irredeemable, is the same as living in hell. You are living in hell, Ludvik, and I pity you.

The help religion offers is simple, Lucie: Give yourself. Give yourself along with the burden you bear. There is a great comfort in giving yourself. I know you've never had anyone to give yourself to, because you've been afraid of people. But there is God. Give yourself to Him. You will feel lighter.

Before her flight there had been only one offense, one entirely unusual: she had been caught stealing flowers in a cemetery.

True religion does not need the favor of secular power. Secular disfavor only strengthens faith.

I don't like journalists. They are for the most part shallow, verbose, and insolent.

Is it an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can't rid myself of the need continually to decipher my own life.

4 all my skepticism,sm trace of irrational superstition did survive in me,strange conviction,4 exmple,tht everyth in life tht happens 2 me also has a sense,tht it means smth,tht life speaks 2 us about itself through its story,tht it gradually reveals a secret,tht it takes d form of a rebus whose msg must b deciphered,tht d stories we live comprise d mythology of our lives&in tht mythology lies d key 2 truth&mystery.

After all, what I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns towards me, what she is for me.

Because it's not your enemies who condemn you to solitude, it's your friends.

I can never say no to those weaker than myself. And because I am six feet two and can lift a two-hundred-pound sack with one hand, in all my life I have yet to find anyone I can resist.

I was happy. I had no regrets about what I'd left behind. Of course I liked my violin and my musicology. But I had no career ambitions. Nothing, not even the most promising success, could replace the joy of coming home.

Vlasta rebukes me for being a dreamer. She says I don't see things as they are. I do see things as they are, but in addition to these visible things I see the invisible. It's not for nothing that fantasy exists. It's what makes homes of our houses.

Capitalism had destroyed this old collective life. And so folk art had lost its foundations, its reason for being, its function. It would be useless to try to resurrect it while social conditions were such that man lived cut off from man, everyone for himself.

Of course, he replied, we must cherish our heritage of folk art, but that wasn't enough. We were in a new age now. Wide horizons were opening. We needed to purge the everyday musical culture of hit-tune cliches, cliched tunes, of the kitsch that the bourgeois had used to force-feed the people. We needed to replace them with an original and genuine art of the people.

Of course, he replied, we must cherish our heritage of folk art, but that wasn't enough. We were in a new age now. Wide horizons were opening. We needed to purge the everyday musical culture of hit-tune cliches, cliched tunes, of the kitsch that the bourgeois had used to force-feed the people. We needed to replace them with an original and genuine art of the people.

Of course, he replied, we must cherish our heritage of folk art, but that wasn't enough. We were in a new age now. Wide horizons were opening. We needed to purge the everyday musical culture of hit-tune cliches, cliched tunes, of the kitsch that the bourgeois had used to force-feed the people. We needed to replace them with an original and genuine art of the people.

They tried to make us believe we had no right to exist, we were nothing but Czech-speaking Germans. We needed to prove to ourselves we'd existed before and still did exist. We all made a pilgrimage to the sources

If only you'd try to understand, Vladimir. Your papa is not just a crackpot folklore addict. Maybe he is an addict, but he goes deeper than that. He hears in folk art the sap that kept Czech culture from drying up. My love for it dates back to the war.

I was more the object than the subject of my story, and (unless one considers suffering, sadness, or defeat values) I have nothing whatsoever to boast of.

And history is terrible because it so often ends up a playground for the immature; a playground for the young Nero, a playground for the young Bonaparte, a playground for easily roused mobs of children whose simulated passions and simplistic poses suddenly metamorphose into a catastrophically real reality.