Vaclav Havel

“Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.”

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

“Work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”

“Theater is there to search for questions. It doesn't give you instructions.”

“The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.”

“Isn't 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.”

“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.”

“It lies in human nature that where you experience your first laughs, you also remember the age kindly.”

“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.”

“Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life.”

“I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect.”

“The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.”

“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.”

“In my opinion, theater shouldn't give advice to citizens.”