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Quotes by Czechoslovakian Authors
"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."
"A number of cases have been reported in which a dying individual has a vision of a person about whose death he or she did not know."
"I certainly don't know if you could claim that every theft is wrong, but I'll prove to you that every theft is forbidden, by simply locking you up."
"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."
"Ancient eschatological texts are actually maps of the inner territories of the psyche that seem to transcend race and culture and originate in the collective unconscious."
"I get out of the taxi and it's probably the only city which in reality looks better than on the postcards, New York."
"We will never remember anything by sitting in one place waiting for the memories to come back to us of their own accord! Memories are scattered all over the world. We must travel if we want to find them and flush them from their hiding places!"
"The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal."
"Unfortunately, modeling takes you with no transition from being a girl to being a business woman."
"It's not your enemies who condemn you to solitude, it's your friends."
"Individuals approaching death often experience encounters with their dead relatives, who seem to welcome them to the next world. These deathbed visions are authentic and convincing; they are often followed by a state of euphoria and seem to ease the transition."
"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."
"If I'm on location on some island, we usually get up at four in the morning to set up. By seven thirty, we're on the beach working until noon, then we rest. It's not exactly a vacation."
"If an ordinary person is silent, it may be a tactical maneuver. If a writer is silent, he is lying."
"I'm certainly not sorry that there were some things I missed. You may think you're missing something at that time but later when you look at it, you didn't miss anything."
"...because love is continual interrogation. I don't know of a better definition of love."
"When I was 4 my mother got divorced and we were very close to each other. I always wanted to be with her. She took me everywhere. When she went for dinner with friends or when they had meetings at the tennis club, I was always there."
"Sometimes I wouldn't give an interview because I didn't have the time or something else was more important. So they come up with a story which I don't think is always true, but they have to sell papers."
"My dear Miss Glory, Robots are not people. They are mechanically more perfect than we are, they have an astounding intellectual capacity, but they have no soul."
"Long ago one of the Cynic philosophers strutted through the streets of Athens in a torn mantle to make himself admired by everyone by displaying his contempt for convention. One day Socrates met him and said: 'I see your vanity through the hole in your mantle.' Your dirt too, sir, is vanity, and your vanity is dirty."
"And everything is controlled and everybody is a member of some committee, because then their watchdogs placed in the committees can control everything, what this person says or how this person think(s), you know."
"The children laughing without knowing why - isn't that beautiful?"
"I think talent is dangerous to have if you take it for granted. If you use it well and put hard work with it together, it's hard to catch that guy. And I think that's what you're seeing right now."
"For any culture which is primarily concerned with meaning, the study of death - the only certainty that life holds for us - must be central, for an understanding of death is the key to liberation in life."
"Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life."
"Unlike scientism, science in the true sense of the word is open to unbiased investigation of any existing phenomena."
"People like me who were engaging in brinkmanship with the party economic bosses and the open dissidents who were being arrested were pursuing a common goal in different ways."
"I have to say I regretted giving up animated movies."
"Traditional academic science describes human beings as highly developed animals and biological thinking machines. We appear to be Newtonian objects made of atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, and organs."
"If I were a doctor, I would diagnose his condition thus: "The patient is suffering from nostalgic insufficiency."
"First of all, whoever didn't want to be a member of this association or the other association, was branded, you know, like a dangerous individualist, you know, infected by the Western decadence, you know. So everybody joined."
"The beliefs concerning reincarnation have great ethical impact on human life and our relationship to the world."
"Without asking her permission, someone is trying to intrude her life, draw her attention, in short, to bother her."
"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."
"Then in 1969, I spent the spring term at Cornell University in New York. The invasion of August 1968 had already happened, but the hardline regime took several months to crack down on dissidents."
"We must have the time to create strict rules so that property is not sold by Communist managers for a low price. They often get payments under the table to sell to the first bidder. This does not build public support for a market economy."
"The experiences associated with death were seen as visits to important dimensions of reality that deserved to be experienced, studied, and carefully mapped."
"I don't make a habit of watching tennis matches, but I try to watch all the major finals. I try to make time for that. So unless I have something going with the kids where I can't, I try to watch, and I enjoy that."
"It is possible to spend one's entire lifetime without ever experiencing the mystical realms or even without being aware of their existence."
"My dream is to have a beautiful old house in Monaco."
"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."
"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."
"In some instances, the accuracy of past-life memories can be objectively verified, sometimes with remarkable detail."
"I've found a place that would amaze you. People used to live there, but now it's all overgrown and no one goes there. Absolutely no one - only me... Just a little house and a garden. And two dogs."
"I think it was the right time for me to retire because nowadays tennis is too incredibly fast and you can say that my style tennis went out of fashion."
"History is the key to everything: politics, religion, even fashion."
"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."
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