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Quotes by Czechoslovakian Authors
"In existential mathematics that experience takes the form of two basic equations: The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory, the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting."
"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."
"An athlete cannot run with money in his pockets. He must run with hope in his heart and dreams in his head."
"We are different, in essence, from other men. If you want to win something, run 100 meters. If you want to experience something, run a marathon."
"Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have - by disrupting that order - a way of surprising."
"There is an urgent need for a radical revision of our current concepts of the nature of consciousness and its relationship to matter and the brain."
"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."
"There are people who can start having very powerful experiences without taking psychedelics. It can happen against their will. This is a universal phenomenon."
"I basically started playing violin at the age of six. That lasted about three years because my previous teacher died and the second teacher didn't really know how to successfully get me going."
"When I was young, I was too slow. I thought I must learn to run fast by practicing to run fast, so I ran 100 meters fast 20 times. Then I came back, slow, slow, slow."
"There was the best teachers from the Czech Philharmonic, highly dedicated people, some of the best musicians in the world passing on the knowledge about the country, about the principles, and about the music."
"It's at the borders of pain and suffering that the men are separated from the boys."
"We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has."
"And she realized that she (her soul) was not at all involved, only her body, her body alone. The body that had betrayed her and that she had sent out into the world among other bodies."
"Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation."
"Why should I practice running slow? I already know how to run slow. I want to learn to run fast."
"Not everything written on Kafka is Kafkology. How then to define Kafkology? By a tautology: Kafkology is discourse for Kafkologizing Kafka. For replacing Kafka with the Kafkologized Kafka."
"Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not."
"I think the whole boycott thing was a bit too much. It's because we're accomplished so much in women's tennis in the last two, three years. We deserve something better."
"Too much faith is the worst ally. When you believe in something literally, through your faith you'll turn it into something absurd. One who is a genuine adherent, if you like, of some political outlook, never takes its sophistries seriously, but only its practical aims, which are concealed beneath these sophistries. Political rhetoric and sophistries do not exist, after all, in order that they be believed; rather, they have to serve as a common and agreed upon alibi. Foolish people who take them in earnest sooner or later discover inconsistencies in them, begin to protest, and finish finally and infamously as heretics and apostates. No, too much faith never brings anything good."
"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."
"It is what makes the reform process an art, not just a science. You have to develop a strategy that tells you what reform measures you should follow and in what sequence."
"A novel does not assert anything, a novel poses questions... The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude."
"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."
"Honestly, I'm more into the computer, the Internet, and checking out scores or the news."
"Many legitimate forms of ownership, mainly cooperative and communal, had not been used to any effective extent mainly because of the imposition of Stalinist restrictions."
"The motif of death plays an important role the human psyche in connection with archetypal and karmic material."
"There are so many people I wish I could have met:"
"I didn't have the same fitness or ability as the other girls, so I had to beat them with my mind."
"I did extensive, extensive recordings and made a classical CD-ROM set, which is still on the market. For ten years, it was by itself as the cream of the crop of samples."
"What I love the most about modeling is that it opens you a lot of different doors of opportunities and takes you to many different places, which then put you in touch with various people and cultures."
"No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development."
"Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one's painful self through the world.But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain."
"Revolution and youth are closely allied. What can a revolution promise to adults? To some it brings disgrace, to others favor. But even that favor is questionable, for it affects only the worse half of life, and in addition to advantages it also entails uncertainty, exhausting activity and upheaval of settled habits.Youth is substantially better off: it is not burdened by guilt, and the revolution can accept young people in toto. The uncertainty of revolutionary times is an advantage for youth, because it is the world of the fathers that is challenged. How exciting to enter into the age of maturity over the shattered ramparts of the adult world!"
"He had come to find out that reality was more than a dream, much more than a dream!"
"I was pretty much prepared because I was already playing in extremely good ways when I arrived from Europe because I played jazz four or five years before I arrived here."
"Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors."
"There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side."
"Great is the victory, but the friendship of all is greater."
"When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novel teaches us to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude."
"Unfortunately, modeling takes you with no transition from being a girl to being a business woman."
"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."
"The worst evil is - and that's the product of censorship - is the self-censorship, because that twists spines, that destroys my character because I have to think something else and say something else, I have to always control myself."
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