Quote

To serve grand ideas with a major work is not bad, nor is it all there's to art.

Vaclav Havel

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Major
Serve
Art
Ideas
Work
Grand
Majors

More quotes by Vaclav Havel

Image
If you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become President.
Vaclav Havel
Image
People, your Government has returned to you!
Vaclav Havel
Image
As in everything else, I must start with myself. That is: in all circumstances try to be decent, just, tolerant, and understanding, and at the same time try to resist corruption and deception. In other words, I must do my utmost to act in harmony with my conscience and my better self.
Vaclav Havel
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Vaclav Havel
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I have read somewhere that in a totalitarian system martyrdom does better than thought.
Vaclav Havel
Image
I think its important for one to take a certain distance from oneself.
Vaclav Havel
Image
People have passed through a very dark tunnel at the end of which there was a light of freedom. Unexpectedly they passed through the prison gates and found themselves in a square. They are now free and they don't know where to go.
Vaclav Havel
Image
None of us know all the potentialities that slumber in the spirit of the population, or all the ways in which that population can surprise us when there is the right interplay of events.
Vaclav Havel
Image
If I have accomplished anything good, then it's mainly because I've been driven by the need to know whether I can accomplish things I'm not sure I have the capacity for.
Vaclav Havel
Image
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
Image
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.
Vaclav Havel
Image
Time and time again I have been persuaded that a huge potential of goodwill is slumbering within our society. It's just that it's incoherent, suppressed, confused, crippled and perplexed.
Vaclav Havel
Image
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
Image
We must not be afraid of dreaming the seemingly impossible if we want the seemingly impossible to become a reality.
Vaclav Havel
Image
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
Image
There can be no doubt that distrust of words is less harmful than unwarranted trust in them.
Vaclav Havel