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
True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say? – Vaclav Havel
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
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
If you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become President. – Vaclav Havel
Sometimes I wonder if suicides arent in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life. – Vaclav Havel
Hope is a feeling that life and work have meaning. You either have it or you dont, regardless of the state of the world that surrounds you. – Vaclav Havel
Isnt 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
Whats certain is that a totalitarian enclave like Cubas cant continue to exist, so change will definitely come there, eventually. – Vaclav Havel
If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. Hes not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, hes really needed. – Vaclav Havel
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete. – Vaclav Havel
The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning – in other words, of absurdity – the more energetically meaning is sought. – Vaclav Havel
