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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

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Vaclav Havel
Age: 75 †
Born: 1936
Born: October 5
Died: 2011
Died: December 18
Director
Dissident
Essayist
Film Director
Human Rights Activist
Leader
Playwright
Poet
Politician
Writer
Praha
Vaclav Havel
Feelings
Ends
Wells
Everything
Well
Certainty
Work
Meaning
Life
Feeling
Hope

More quotes by Vaclav Havel

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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.
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We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought.
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There can be no doubt that distrust of words is less harmful than unwarranted trust in them.
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Truth and love will overcome lies and hatred.
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I do think Russian foreign policy is very savvy. There's a need for great caution because the Russians are able to discreetly blackmail countries.
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If you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become President.
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But if I were to say who influenced me most, then I'd say Franz Kafka. And his works were always anchored in the Central European region.
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The award is destined for scientists who do not fear to touch on some of the darkest aspects of being without betraying what they have achieved. On the contrary, they head in this direction.
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The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor, an ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions, to laugh at others and at ourselves, a sense of irony regarding everything that calls out for parody in this world. In other words, I can only recommend perspective and distance.
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To serve grand ideas with a major work is not bad, nor is it all there's to art.
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Man is in fact nailed down - like Christ on the Cross - to a grid of paradoxes. He balances between the torment of not knowing his mission and the joy of carrying it out, between nothingness and meaningfulness. And like Christ, he is in fact victorious by virtue of his defeats.
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Ownership is not a vice, not something to be ashamed of, but rather a commitment, and an instrument by which the general good can be served.
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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
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Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.
Vaclav Havel
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The world is not divided into two types of being, one superior and the other merely surrounding it. Being, nature, the universe - they are all one infinitely complex and mysterious metaorganism of which we are but a part, though a unique one.
Vaclav Havel
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I think its important for one to take a certain distance from oneself.
Vaclav Havel
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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
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The hope of the world lies in the rehabilitation of the living human being, not just the body but also the soul.
Vaclav Havel
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The previous regime ... reduced man to a means of production and nature to a tool of production. Thus it attacked both their very essence and their mutual relationship. It reduced gifted and autonomous people to nuts and bolts in some monstrously huge, noisy, and stinking machine.
Vaclav Havel
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It seems to me that one of the most basic human experiences, one that is genuinely universal and unites-or, more precisely, could unite-all of humanity, is the experience of transcendence in the broadest sense of the word.
Vaclav Havel