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Quotes by Czechoslovakian Authors
"To boast of a performance which I cannot beat is merely stupid vanity. And if I can beat it that means there is nothing special about it. What has passed is already finished with. What I find more interesting is what is still to come."
"Any acceleration constitutes progress, Miss Glory. Nature had no understanding of the modern rate of work. From a technical standpoint the whole of childhood is pure nonsense. Simply wasted time. An untenable waste of time."
"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."
"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."
"The human psyche shows that each individual is an extension of all of existence."
"An old villa surrounded by a garden looked to them like the image of a comforting home, the dream of an idyll long past."
"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."
"Whether or not we believe in survival of consciousness after death, reincarnation, and karma, it has very serious implications for our behavior."
"I continued studying by myself in the field of jazz with my own technique of improvisation, walking bass lines, rhythms, all kinds of stuff, which I created for myself."
"I was fortunate enough to visit a lot of beautiful places around the world. The most astonishing and memorable experiences were my trips to Africa and Australia."
"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."
"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."
"I was paid to read Western economic texts. In a way, the regime paid for their own undermining."
"So, thanks God, our films, our first films were suddenly being appreciated by the Western media; especially France was very good, and Switzerland was very good."
"Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."
"Tereza's mother never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything. Her words had the ring of truth, backed as they were by the experience of a woman who had lost everything because of her child. Tereza would listen and believe that being a mother was the highest value in life and that being a mother was a great sacrifice. If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress."
"Relativism is not indifference; on the contrary, passionate indifference is necessary in order for you not to hear the voices that oppose your absolute decrees."
"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."
"I'm now beginning to feel that the pessimistic vision is not for the movies."
"A girl who is interested in becoming a model must first accept the fact that she is the product. She must be ready to deal with a lot of rejection."
"If I don't practice the way I should, then I won't play the way that I know I can."
"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."
"People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still."
"There came into the world an unlimited abundance of everything people need. But people need everything except unlimited abundance."
"The elimination of the fear of death transforms the individual's way of being in the world."
"If I were a doctor, I would diagnose his condition thus: "The patient is suffering from nostalgic insufficiency."
"Unfortunately, modeling takes you with no transition from being a girl to being a business woman."
"He had come to find out that reality was more than a dream, much more than a dream!"
"An important consequence of freeing oneself from the fear of death is a radical opening to spirituality of a universal and non-denominational type."
"You know what happened, you know, in 1938: France, England, you know, just sold out Czechoslovakia to Hitler."
"It's at the borders of pain and suffering that the men are separated from the boys."
"Miles Davis had me play and he hired me the following week and after that, everything broke wide open."
"Great God of the Ants, thou hast granted victory to thy servants. I appoint thee honorary Colonel."
"People should be a little loony, Helena. That's the best thing about them."
"Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors."
"I thought it was time to get a group together and the first person I thought of was Wayne Shorter. I called Wayne and in the meantime, Wayne called me to make an album with him, which was Super Nova."
"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."
"The main thing that those two albums have in common aside from my music, which of course, a sense of it, you can recognize, it is that the bass on Infinite Search was playing much, much less like a bass."
"Laughing deeply is living deeply."
"Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest."
"My acting coach makes the impossible accessible."
"When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete."
"It was a great thing to be a human being. It was something tremendous. Suddenly I'm conscious of a million sensations buzzing in me like bees in a hive. Gentlemen, it was a great thing."
"Humor was not important only for me, humor was important for this nation for centuries, to survive, you know."
"My boyfriend thinks I lost my true calling to be a librarian."
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