Vaclav Havel Quotes

It's true that the biggest value of life is that it's going to stop. I was thinking when I was in New York the last time that all that we see that has importance is man-made. It isn't nature-made. And when I was looking through the window, looking at New York, I was so moved by humanity's desire for immortality-because that's what it is.

I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.

Art is long, and time is fleeting, And our hearts, though stout and brave, Still, like muffled drums, are beating Funeral marches to the grave.

Mortalhood is a fine state to visit, but you'd better not call it home.

We are all under sentence of death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve.

We are things of a day. What are we? What are we not? The shadow of a dream is man, no more.

The greatness of a man is only measured by his urologist.

Once more there sounded within me the terrible warning that there is only one life for all men, that there is only one life for all men, that there is no other and that all that can be enjoyed must be enjoyed here. In eternity no other chance will be given to us.

Some men spend their whole life furnishing for themselves the things proper to life without realizing that at our birth each of us was poured a mortal brew to drink.

There came to him an image of man’s whole life upon the earth. It seemed to him that all man’s life was like a tiny spurt of flame that blazed out briefly in an illimitable and terrifying darkness, and that all man’s grandeur, tragic dignity, his heroic glory, came from the brevity and smallness of this flame. He knew his life was little and would be extinguished, and that only darkness was immense and everlasting. And he knew that he would die with defiance on his lips, and that the shout of his denial would ring with the last pulsing of his heart into the maw of all-engulfing night.

For me, the problem of time is linked up with that of death, with the thought that we inevitably draw closer and closer to it, with the horror of decay.

But thought's the slave of life, and life time's fool.

All that is transitory is but a metaphor.

This was what it meant to be human, to know that time moved and all things changed.

Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.

You and I are like the first two people on earth who at the beginning of the world had nothing to cover themselves with - at the end of it, you and I are just as stripped and homeless. And you and I are the last remembrance of all that immeasurable greatness which has been created in all the thousands of years between their time and ours, and it is in memory of all that vanished splendour that we live and love and weep and cling to one another.

Are we not Spirits, that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade away again into air and Invisibility? Oh, Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry a future Ghost within us; but are, in very deed, Ghosts! These Limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force; this life-blood with its burning Passion? They are dust and shadow; a Shadow-system gathered round our Me; wherein, through some moments or years, the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the Flesh.

We have no participation in Being, because all human nature is ever midway between being born and dying, giving off only a vague image and shadow of itself, and a weak and uncertain opinion. And if you chance to fix your thoughts on trying to grasp its essence, it would be neither more nor less than if your tried to clutch water.

So passes away the glory of this world. ('Sic transit gloria mundi.')

Immortality is like trying to carve your initials in a block of ice in the middle of July.

But death we are, and death we've always been.

Only the ephemeral is of lasting value.

This body is not a home, but an inn; and that only for a short time.

The short-lived self, teetering on the edge of extinction, is the only thing that can ever really matter.