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Quotes by Czechoslovakian Authors
"I especially love French, Italian and Japanese cuisines."
"By the time I returned to Czechoslovakia, I had an understanding of the principles of the market."
"Great God of the Ants, thou hast granted victory to thy servants. I appoint thee honorary Colonel."
"Mother belonged to a realm of other creatures: smaller, lighter, more easily blown away."
"Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life."
"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."
"Vertigo is something else than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which temps and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defense ourselves."
"We will also allow state companies to sell shares to their workers and will pass a law allowing citizens to start companies of their own with no limits on the number of employees or on the firm's output."
"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."
"I put my money in the bank: I have to think of life after modeling, when I'm not famous any more."
"If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect."
"History is the key to everything: politics, religion, even fashion."
"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."
"Of course, these were only dreams. How could a sensible woman leave a happy marriage? All the same, a seductive voice from afar kept breaking into her conjugal peace: it was the voice of solitude."
"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."
"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."
"For what is love if one loves a woman without knowing her? Just a decision to love? Or even an imitation? The question concerns us all: If, from our childhood on, the examples of love were not there inviting us to copy them, would we know what "loving" means?"
"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."
"People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past."
"To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it."
"Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass."
"Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress."
"I rarely do masks because, if I have any extra time, I'd rather spend it with my friends than on myself."
"I want you to be weak. As weak as I am."
"My goal was to play in the NHL, because that is the best hockey in the world."
"You still stand watch, O human star, burning without a flicker, perfect flame, bright and resourceful spirit. Each of your rays a great idea - O torch which passes from hand to hand, from age to age, world without end."
"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."
"I read Freud's Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis in basically one sitting. I decided to enroll in medical school. It was almost like a conversion experience."
"We've known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world, nor reshape it, nor head off its dangerous headlong rush. There's been only one possible resistance: to not take it seriously."
"The top players talk more now, and we have more meetings. We're just trying to get things better. But we still need somebody who could make a difference."
"I do pottery. I love it. It's very relaxing; it takes me to another planet."
"I remember in 1968 when we were in Cannes, in the festival, and we were supposed to be there 10 days, and the second day the festival collapsed because the French, you know, film-makers raised the red flag in the festival and ended the festival."
"You can have a revolution wherever you like, except in a government office; even were the world to come to an end, you'd have to destroy the universe first and then government offices."
"Asylum was good exposure for me and it is still shown quite often on television. I remember the special effects people had fun making a little doll that looked like me - which is not so easy - and it had to move along the floor."
"Lovers of literature will look for the remains of the golden treasure in that shipwreck on the bottom of the sea of criticism."
"If dogs could talk, perhaps we would find it as hard to get along with them as we do with people."
"The events in the square, of course, made a deep impression on me and many other parents."
"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."
"As long as I had easy access to psychedelics at the government-sponsored research project, most of my energy went into psychedelic sessions."
"I'm now beginning to feel that the pessimistic vision is not for the movies."
"In some instances, the accuracy of past-life memories can be objectively verified, sometimes with remarkable detail."
"In the first day of the Soviet Army's arrival, I and the other comrades were isolated and then found ourselves here, not knowing anything... I can only conjecture what could have happened."
"Many cultures have independently developed a belief system in reincarnation that includes return of the unit of consciousness to another physical lifetime on Earth."
"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."
"Unlike scientism, science in the true sense of the word is open to unbiased investigation of any existing phenomena."
"Since we humans have the better brain, isn't it our responsibility to protect our fellow creatures from, oddly enough, ourselves?"
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