Vaclav Havel Quotes

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

  Vaclav Havel

  Topics in Life

• The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought.

  Vaclav Havel

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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 in Politics

  Tags in Purely

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

  Vaclav Havel

  Topics in Life

  Tags in Meaning

• 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 in Life

  Tags in Hopelessness, Certainty

• Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have – by disrupting that order – a way of surprising.

  Vaclav Havel

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Surprising, Assume

• When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete.

  Vaclav Havel

  Topics in Truth

  Tags in Freedom, Complete

• Genuine politics — even politics worthy of the name — the only politics I am willing to devote myself to — is simply a matter of serving those around us: serving the community and serving those who will come after us. Its deepest roots are moral because it is a responsibility expressed through action, to and for the whole.

  Vaclav Havel

  Topics in Politics, Service

  Tags in Human Rights, Compassion, Ethics, Responsibility, Duty, Community

• If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He’s not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he’s really needed.

  Vaclav Havel

  Topics in Job

  Tags in Peripheral, Little

• 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.

  Vaclav Havel

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Hope, Obviously

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

  Vaclav Havel

  Topics in Success, Work

  Tags in Good, Purpose

• 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 in Uncategorized

  Tags in Less, Tragedy

• 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.

  Vaclav Havel

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Optimism, Hope

• 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.

  Vaclav Havel

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Surrounds, Hope

• Lying can never save us from another lie.

  Vaclav Havel

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Us, Save

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

  Vaclav Havel

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Salvation, Responsibility, Heart

• 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.

  Vaclav Havel

  Topics in Dissent

  Tags in Responsibility

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Spiral, Get

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

  Vaclav Havel

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Deeper, Absence

• 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.

  Vaclav Havel

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Powerful, World

Vaclav Havel (29)

Birth:	5th October, 1936
Death:	18th December, 2011
Nationality:	Czech
Profession:	Essayist, Poet, Politician, Playwriter

About

Václav Havel was a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician. Havel was the ninth and last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the Czech Republic. He wrote more than 20 plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally.

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