Vaclav Havel Quotes

I have found that good taste, oddly enough, plays an important role in politics. Why is it like that? The most probable reason is that good taste is a visible manifestation of human sensibility toward the world, environment, people.

Vaclav Havel

• People
• World
• Good
• Important
• Why
• Environment
• Taste

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Quotes to Explore

• 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
  • Life
  • Law
  • Universe

• I feel that the dormant goodwill in people needs to be stirred. People need to hear that it makes sense to behave decently or to help others, to place common interests above their own, to respect the elementary rules of human coexistence.

  

  Vaclav Havel
  • People
  • Help
  • Respect

• 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
  • Life
  • Man
  • Meaning

• Keep the company of those who seek the truth- run from those who have found it.

  

  Vaclav Havel
  • Truth
  • Company
  • Keep

• 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
  • Hope
  • Conviction
  • Optimism

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

  

  Vaclav Havel
  • Life
  • Wonder
  • Sad

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

  

  Vaclav Havel
  • Experience
  • Words
  • Meaning

• Truth and love will overcome lies and hatred.

  

  Vaclav Havel
  • Love
  • Truth
  • For Her

• 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
  • World
  • Power
  • Small

• 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
  • World
  • Good
  • Work

• Hope 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
  • Hope
  • Conviction
  • Turn

• 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
  • Time
  • Hope
  • Political

• I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.

  

  Vaclav Havel
  • Words
  • Government
  • Military

• We are the first atheistic and global, all-embracing civilization. You cannot tell whether you are sitting at an airport in Hong Kong or in a hotel in Alaska. Everything is instrumentalized, subjected to a short-term purpose. It is quite possible that in such a situation any sense of a deeper meaning gets lost.

  

  Vaclav Havel
  • Lost
  • Purpose
  • Civilization

• 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
  • Man
  • Impossible
  • Jump

• 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
  • Life
  • Hope
  • Doubt

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

  

  Vaclav Havel
  • Experience
  • Remember
  • Nature

• Lying can never save us from another lie.

  

  Vaclav Havel
  • Lying
  • Lie
  • Save

• If by believing you mean praying to an anthropomorphic deity who created the world and half controls it and half observes it, then I am probably not a believer. But if you mean that it is not all accidental, that there is a mystery to existence, a deeper meaning, that I do believe in.

  

  Vaclav Havel
  • World
  • Believe
  • Mystery

• I think it's important for one to take a certain distance from oneself.

  

  Vaclav Havel
  • Important
  • Think
  • Distance

• 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
  • Free
  • Peace
  • Independent

• Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not.

  

  Vaclav Havel
  • Risk
  • Laugh
  • Looking

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

  

  Vaclav Havel
  • Way
  • Drama
  • Order

• 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
  • World
  • Heart
  • Power