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Quotes by Czechoslovakian Authors
"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 believe it is essential for our planetary future to develop tools that can change the consciousness which has created the crisis that we are in."
"Flying is awful, there's nothing to do when you're up in the air. I bloat up, my skin gets dry, and when we hit turbulence, I'm terrified."
"I was always at peace because of the way my mom treated me."
"I have just come from the castle, where I have seen the president of the republic, and I can tell you that he has accepted all of my proposals without making any changes."
"So the whole basis for jazz music is based on the fact that the bass player could not play his instrument."
"Socialism is good when it comes to wages, but it tells me nothing when it comes to other questions in life that are more private and painful, for which I must seek answers elsewhere."
"Be these people either Conservatives or Socialists, Yellows or Reds, the most important thing is - and that is the point I want to stress - that all of them are right in the plain and moral sense of the word."
"Art must always stand guard against stirring emotions that lie outside the aesthetic: sexual arousal, terror, disgust, shock."
"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."
"They taught us because they wanted to pass the knowledge on and educate young musicians. It was not because they had to teach because they failed as musicians. There is a huge difference in the reasons why someone is teaching and what they can offer and what they cannot offer."
"You know, 20 years... the films of television when it started, the literature, radio in communist countries, they're clean as a whistle; there was no violence, no sex, no drugs, nothing."
"Lovers of literature will look for the remains of the golden treasure in that shipwreck on the bottom of the sea of criticism."
"My mother's a secretary; my father's an electrician in a mining company."
"You can't climb up to the second floor without a ladder. When you set your aim too high and don't fulfill it, then your enthusiasm turns to bitterness. Try for a goal that's reasonable, and then gradually raise it."
"But for the time being, I've only learned one cake recipe and how to make scrambled eggs."
"My boyfriend thinks I lost my true calling to be a librarian."
"The British cinema had been very dull and conformist."
"It is possible to spend one's entire lifetime without ever experiencing the mystical realms or even without being aware of their existence."
"There is a great advantage in training under unfavorable conditions. It is better to train under bad conditions, for the difference is then a tremendous relief in a race."
"I play a role in front of the cameras, just like in the movies."
"Miles Davis had me play and he hired me the following week and after that, everything broke wide open."
"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 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."
"Since we humans have the better brain, isn't it our responsibility to protect our fellow creatures from, oddly enough, ourselves?"
"Simply enjoy life and the great pleasures that come with it."
"O God and Lord, now the council condemns even Your own act and Your own law as heresy, since You Yourself did lay Your cause before Your Father as the just judge, as an example for us, whenever we are sorely oppressed."
"I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be."
"In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties."
"There is nothing harder to explain than humor."
"There came into the world an unlimited abundance of everything people need. But people need everything except unlimited abundance."
"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."
"Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue - perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one."
"But I also like to shower my parents with presents. I bought them a beautiful car and a house."
"Mother Nature made me the way I am, and I should be happy."
"Do you think that a doe in the jaws of a tiger feels less horror than you? People thought up the idea that animals don't have the same capability for suffering as humans, because otherwise they couldn't bear the knowledge that they are surrounded by a world of nature that is horror and nothing but horror." Paul was pleased that man was gradually covering the whole earth with concrete. It was as if he were watching a cruel murderess being walled up."
"A big element of what they regard as conformity is simply a desire to have an audience."
"If I were a doctor, I would diagnose his condition thus: "The patient is suffering from nostalgic insufficiency."
"I started when I was 8 years old, which is obviously nowadays pretty late, but I guess in my generation it was all right. I had plenty of other interests and I didn't do only tennis."
"According to materialistic science, any memory requires a material substrate, such as the neuronal network in the brain or the DNA molecules of the genes."
"And think about the precise meaning of that term: a Narcissus is not proud. A proud man has disdain for other people, he undervalues them. The Narcissus overvalues them, because in every person's eyes he sees his own image, and wants to embellish it. So he takes nice care of all his mirrors."
"That's one of the reasons I moved to Florida. Of course, the main reason is the weather and the training. But there's more jealousy in Switzerland because it's so little and they don't have so many athletes."
"Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all."
"Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it. It is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it."
"A radical inner transformation and rise to a new level of consciousness might be the only real hope we have in the current global crisis brought on by the dominance of the Western mechanistic paradigm."
"To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it."
"The first step in liquidating a people,' said Hubl, 'is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster."
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