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.
—Vaclav Havel
Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren’t in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Suicide
The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Literature, Books
I am not an optimist, because I am not sure that everything ends well. Nor am I a pessimist, because I am not sure that everything ends badly. I just carry hope in my heart.
Hope is the feeling that life and work have a meaning. You either have it or you don’t, regardless of the state of the world that surrounds you.
Life without hope is an empty, boring, and useless life. I cannot imagine that I could strive for something if I did not carry hope in me.
I am thankful to God for this gift. It is as big as life itself.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Hope
This is a confusing and uncertain period, when a thousand wise words can go completely unnoticed, and one thoughtless word can provoke an utterly nonsensical furor.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Language
I have preserved my identity, put its credibility to the test and defended my dignity. What good this will bring the world I don’t know. But for me it is good.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Identity
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.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Protest
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.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Tyranny
We must not be afraid of dreaming the seemingly impossible if we want the seemingly impossible to become a reality.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Dream
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.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Awareness, Action
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.
—Vaclav Havel
The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning—in other words, of absurdity—the more energetically meaning is sought.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Absence, Discovery
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.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Independence
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 first experiencing its absurdity…
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Hope
The dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power. He has no desire for office and does not gather votes. He does not attempt to charm the public, he offers nothing and promises nothing. He can offer, if anything, only his own skin—and he offers it solely because he has no other way of affirming the truth he stands for. His actions simply articulate his dignity as a citizen, regardless of the cost.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Truth
Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to prosecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Tyranny
There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Art, Artists, Arts
Hope… is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Hope, Work
Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Storytelling
Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Humor, Laughter
True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say?
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Oppression
We must come to understand the deep mutual connection or kinship between the various forms of our spirituality. We must recollect our original spiritual and moral substance, which grew out of the same essential experience of humanity. I believe that this is the only way to achieve a genuine renewal of our sense of responsibility for ourselves and for the world. And at the same time, it is the only way to achieve a deeper understanding among cultures that will enable them to work together in a truly ecumenical way to create a new order for the world.
—Vaclav 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.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Reason
The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Apathy, Living
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?
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Words
Without commonly shared and widely entrenched moral values and obligations, neither the law, nor democratic government, nor even the market economy will function properly.
—Vaclav Havel
A state that denies its citizens their basic rights becomes a danger to its neighbors as well: internal arbitrary rule will be reflected in arbitrary external relations. The suppression of public opinion, the abolition of public competition for power and its public exercise opens the way for the state power to arm itself in any way it sees fit. A state that does not hesitate to lie to its own people will not hesitate to lie to other states.
—Vaclav 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.
—Vaclav Havel
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.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Age
The law is only one of several imperfect and more or less external ways of defending what is better in life against what is worse. By itself, the law can never create anything better. Establishing respect for the law does not automatically ensure a better life for that, after all, is a job for people and not for laws and institutions.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Law, Lawyers
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