Quotes by Vaclav Havel

“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.”

“As far as your personal requirements are concerned, the ideal is to have fewer involvements, fewer obligations, and fewer affairs, business or whatever. However, so far as the interest of the larger community is concerned, you must have as many involvements as possible and as many activities as possible.”

“The family is the most basic unit of government. As the first community to which a person is attached and the first authority under which a person learns to live, the family establishes societys most basic values.”

“The motivating force of the theory of a Democratic way of life is still a belief that as individuals we live cooperatively, and, to the best of our ability, serve the community in which we live, and that our own success, to be real, must contribute t”

“For a community to be whole and healthy, it must be based on peoples love and concern for each other.”

“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.”

“The first thing I remember about the world...is that I was a stranger in it. This feeling, which is at once the glory and desolation of homo sapiens, provides the only thread of consistency that I can detect in my life.”

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete.

Sometimes I wonder if suicides arent in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life.