Quotes by Vaclav Havel

“Work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”

“It lies in human nature that where you experience your first laughs, you also remember the age kindly.”

“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:...”

“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.”

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

“When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete.”

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

“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, th...”

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.”

“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 headi...”

“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.”

“Hope is a feeling that life and work have meaning. You either have it or you don't, regardless of the state of the world that surrounds you.”

“Isn't it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope perhaps one could never find sense in life without fi...”

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

“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.”

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

“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.”

“For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.”

“The point I am trying to make is that words are a mysterious, ambiguous, ambivalent, and perfidious phenomenon. They can be rays of light in a realm of darkness. . . . They can equally be lethal ar...”

“The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We feel morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. Concepts such as love, friendship...”