Quote

If one were required to increase the dramatic seriousness of his face in relation to the seriousness of the problems he had to confront, he would quickly petrify and become his own statue.

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
Problems
Confront
Face
Seriousness
Faces
Required
Become
Dramatic
Problem
Quickly
Would
Relation
Statue
Laughter
Increase
Statues

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Hope is the deep orientation of the human soul that can be held at the darkest times.
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Follow the man who seeks the truth run from the man who has found it.
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The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and ... often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.
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Lying can never save us from another lie.
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The real test of a man is not when he plays the role that he wants for himself but when he plays the role destiny has for him.
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I am convinced that we will never build a democratic state based on rule of law if we do not at the same time build a state that is-regardless of how unscientific this may sound to the ears of a political scientist-humane, moral, intellectual and spiritual, and cultural.
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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.
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I am not sure one is capable of reflecting absurdity without having a strong sense of meaning. Absurdity makes sense only against a meaningful background. It is the deeper meaning that is shedding light on the absurdity. There must be a vanish point, a metaphysical horizon if you will where absurdity and meaning merge.
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The Declaration of Independence states that the Creator gave man the right to liberty. It seems man can realize that liberty only if he does not forget the One who endowed him with it.
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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.
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Whether all is really lost or not depends entirely on whether or not I am lost.
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It lies in human nature that where you experience your first laughs, you also remember the age kindly.
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Hope is not a feeling. It is not the belief that things will turn out well, but the conviction that what you are doing makes sense, no matter how things turn out.
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A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clearsighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerality of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action.
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You can't spend your whole life criticizing something and then, when you have the chance to do it better, refuse to go near it.
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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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Let us admit that most of us writers feel an essential aversion to politics. By taking such a position, however, we accept the perverted principle of specialization, according to which some are paid to write about the horrors of the world and human responsibility and others to deal with those horrors and bear the human responsibility for them.
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I have read somewhere that in a totalitarian system martyrdom does better than thought.
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There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side.
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I am in favor of [actions] that have authenticity, roots, originality, verve, balance, taste, communicativeness, challenge, relevance to their time-in short, things that make sense.
Vaclav Havel