Vaclav Havel Quotes

She made the decision that her existence had lost its meaning. And you cannot judge that.

If there is no God, then man sometimes thinks he is god, and sometimes tries to live like a god.

Western Humanism does not ask the fundamental questions about the meaning and limits of personal experience. Humsniists leave aside the mysteries of contingency and transitoriness, for the certainties of research, production, consumption.

Modernity is a deal. The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.

And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.

I wore Nietzsche's eyes. Now that I step back to see, I haven't been me.

A mere 400 years after our fall from the center of the universe, we have experienced the fall from the center of ourselves.

For every seeing soul, there are two absorbing facts - I, and the abyss.

We cannot bear to regard ourselves simply as playthings of blind chance, we cannot admit to feeling ourselves abandoned.

Thrown into the atmosphere of action [in 1954], I suddenly understood the kind of neurosis that dominated all my previous work. I had not been able to recognize it before: I was inside. Simone de Beauvoir had guessed these reasons before I did.

When I learned that there was such a thing as an atheist, I looked it up - and found out that the definition fitted me to a tee. Finally, at the age of 24, I found out who and what I was. Better late than never.

It is part of the pholosophic dullness of our time that there are millions of rational monsters walking about on their hind legs, observing the world through pairs of flexible little lenses, periodically supplying themselves with energy by pushing organic substances through holes in their faces, who see nothing fabulous whatever about themselves.

Within our whole universe the story only has the authority to answer that cry of heart of its characters, that one cry of heart of each of them: "Who am I?"

I know not whence I came, nor whither I go, nor who I am.

We are all potentially such sick men. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison-inmates. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity of our voluntary career comes over us, that all our morality appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well-being that our lives ought to be grounded in, but alas! are not.

how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any lifted from the no of all nothing human merely being doubt unimaginable You?

The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.

I've always found life quite difficult to explain to people or to myself.

Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.

Sometimes I try my hand at turning out small profundities and uncertain short stories, but I always end up with just one single word: God.

I was not I, I was nothing - and that seemed to me quite marvelous.

For intellectual authority, the appropriate version of Descartes 's cogito would be today: I am talked about, therefore I am.

We were essentially torn from the Gaian womb, thrust into the birth canal of history, and expelled sometime around the fall of the Roman Empire into the cold hard world of modern science, existentialism and all the rest of it.

I remember that one time Carl Sagan was giving a talk, and he spelled out, in a kind of withering succession, these great theories of demotion that science has dealt us, all of the ways in which science is telling us we are not who we would like to believe we are. At the end of it, a young man came up to him and he said: "What do you give us in return? Now that you've taken everything from us? What meaning is left, if everything that I've been taught since I was a child turns out to be untrue?" Carl looked at him and said, Do something meaningful.

Do you think that people ever really do believe they will die, that the world will just go along as always without them? I wonder if we aren't all a little surprised at the moment of crossover, if we don't look back over our shoulders saying, Now hold on.