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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
Hope
Feelings
Ends
Wells
Everything
Well
Certainty
Work
Meaning
Life
Feeling

More quotes by Vaclav Havel

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It's not hard to stand behind one's successes. But to accept responsibility for one's failures... that is devishly hard!
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The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.
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True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say?
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The only lost cause is one we give up on before we enter the struggle.
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Man is not an omipotent master of the universe, allowed to do with impunity whatever he thinks, or whatever suits him at the moment. The world we live in is made of an immensely complex and mysterious tissue about which we know very little and which we must treat with utmost humility.
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Communism was overthrown by life, by thought, by dignity.
Vaclav Havel
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Human rights, human freedoms... and human dignity have their deepest roots somewhere outside the perceptible world... while the state is a human creation, human beings are the creation of God.
Vaclav Havel
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Truth and love will overcome lies and hatred.
Vaclav Havel
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I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect.
Vaclav Havel
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There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.
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There can be no doubt that distrust of words is less harmful than unwarranted trust in them.
Vaclav Havel
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Planetary democracy does not yet exist but our global civilization is already preparing a place for it. It is the very Earth we inhabit linked with Heaven above us. Only in this setting can the mutuality and the commonality of the human race be newly created with reverence and gratitude for that which transcends each of us and all of us together.
Vaclav Havel
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When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete.
Vaclav Havel
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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
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All human suffering concerns each human being.
Vaclav Havel
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Technological measures are important, but equally important is... a consciousness of the commonality of all living beings and an emphasis on shared responsibility.
Vaclav Havel
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Either we have hope within us or we don't It is a dimension of the soul, and is not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the World or observation of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart.
Vaclav Havel
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I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than 10 military divisions.
Vaclav Havel
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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.
Vaclav Havel
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The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning...
Vaclav Havel