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Quotes by Czechoslovakian Authors
"If consciousness can function independently of the body during one's lifetime, it could be able to do the same after death."
"There is the glamour side of it, which allows you to meet great variety of people with whom you simply can have a good time, but there's also the sad side of it that drags you into a superficial and artificial world."
"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."
"I hope to continue building my acting career and work more on projects that fulfill my artistic thirst."
"That was really so upsetting when you are trying to pass on some very serious knowledge and be basically, treated worse than a student coming off the street because his father pays the tuition. Come on. Give me a break. This is no school. This is a joke."
"I can only say, think of me what you will, I have worked for thirty years in the Party, and my whole family has devoted everything to the affairs of the Party, the affairs of socialism."
"People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still."
"Because beyond their practical function, all gestures have a meaning that exceeds the intention of those who make them; when people in bathing suits fling themselves into the water, it is joy itself that shows in the gesture, notwithstanding any sadness the divers may actually feel. When someone jumps into the water fully clothed, it is another thing entirely: the only person who jumps into the water fully clothed is a person trying to drown; and a person trying to drown does not dive headfirst; he lets himself fall: thus speaks the immemorial language of gestures."
"But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?"
"For exercise, I now run with my chocolate Lab puppy, Oscar."
"Music is another great pleasure of life. I like all sorts."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I talk to Simon, I write to him. I never used to write a diary. But now I'm writing a diary to him. I think it's not just me, but lots of others, family and friends, can still feel him around."
"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."
"Unfortunately, modeling takes you with no transition from being a girl to being a business woman."
"To pursue a so-called Third Way is foolish. We had our experience with this in the 1960s when we looked for a socialism with a human face. It did not work, and we must be explicit that we are not aiming for a more efficient version of a system that has failed."
"Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary."
"Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud."
"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."
"What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating."
"Isn't that exactly the definition of biography? An artificial logic imposed on an 'incoherent succession of images'?"
"He had come to find out that reality was more than a dream, much more than a dream!"
"Loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they too, fade away."
"He knew very well that his memory detested him, that it did nothing but slander him; therefore he tried not to believe it and to be more lenient toward his own life. But that didn't help: he took no pleasure in looking back, and he did it as seldom as possible."
"There is something that falls short of perfection in every book, without exception, something influenced by the age, even something ridiculous; just like everyone, without exception, has weaknesses."
"Beyond this day, no thinking person could fail to see what would happen."
"Biographers know nothing about the intimate sex lives of their own wives, but they think they know all about Stendhal's or Faulkner's."
"Honestly, I'm more into the computer, the Internet, and checking out scores or the news."
"I make money because I have to pay for everything apart from my school fees. My mother even makes me pay my own telephone bill."
"For me, it's a compliment to be compared with Marilyn, the unforgettable actress, the most beautiful one of all. But, curves aside, we have very little in common."
"A runner must run with dreams in his heart, not money in his pocket."
"It is up to us to make the right choice and the right decisions."
"Actually, I don't really like being confused with my image."
"I love photo sessions. I'm alone, I'm the queen, everyone's taking care of me."
"I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect."
"But I love fish, cheese and meat, and I eat everything, but only in small quantities if it's rich."
"It's at the borders of pain and suffering that the men are separated from the boys."
"I was very much fascinated with the technology we had that we could edit in the computer our compositions, but all the sounds that were available on the market were crap."
"Wherever on this planet ideals of personal freedom and dignity apply, there you will find the cultural inheritance of England."
"For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies."
"The novel is born not of the theoretical spirit but of the spirit of humor."
"Man will never be enslaved by machinery if the man tending the machine be paid enough."
"There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side."
"Great is the victory, but the friendship of all is greater."
"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."
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