Vaclav Havel Quotes

The salvation of the world is in man's suffering.

My journey is so similar to everyone else's journey, because we all are human. We all have been defeated by the powers of darkness, and we all find redemption in the light of Christ.

We don't like admitting this, but it is a key component of human existence: the fact that life has the potential for things both wondrous and horrific.

Life is such a tragicomedy.

Acquisition means life to miserable mortals.

The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers.

Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth - look at the dying man's struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.

Not to be born is, past all prizing, best.

Bad things are not the worst things that can happen to us. Nothing is the worst thing that can happen to us!

I think portraying human beings trying to hold on to their humanity against pretty much certain odds that they'll die horribly in some way someday, and that they'll face horrible things along the way, I don't know - I think that's a beautiful thing. It's a wonderful thing.

I am sure I ought not to be, but I have great reason to tremble lest Satan and my own wicked heart get the better of me. It is no easy matter to fight such enemies as these, but with Christ strengthening me, I know I shall come off more than a conquerer.

Heaven fashioned us of nothing; and we strive to bring ourselves to nothing.

Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.

Loss is something that I think is ultimately the number one struggle for humans.

I searched all areas of knowledge, and not only did I fail to find anything, but I was convinced that all those who had explored as I did had also come up with nothing. Not only had they found nothing, but they had clearly acknowledged the same thing that had brought me to despair: the only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.

To be a man, to have been born without knowing it or wanting it, to be thrown into the ocean of existence, to be obliged to swim, to exist; to have an identity; to resist the pressure and shocks from the outside and the unforeseen and unforeseeable acts - one's own and those of others - which so often exceed one's capacities? And what is more, to endure one's own thoughts about all this: in a word, to be human.

Before the beginning of years There came to the making of man Time with a gift of tears, Grief with a glass that ran, Pleasure with pain for leaven, Summer with flowers that fell, Remembrance fallen from heaven, And Madness risen from hell, Strength without hands to smite, Love that endures for a breath; Night, the shadow of light, And Life, the shadow of death.

We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot.

From all our observations we may collect with certainty, that misery is the lot of man, but cannot discover in what particular condition it will find most alleviations.

Sometimes it is hard not to say, 'God forgive God.' Sometimes it is hard to say so much. But if our faith is true, He didn't. He crucified Him.

All human beings hang by a thread, an abyss may open under their feet at any moment, and yet they have to go and invent all sortsof difficulties for themselves and spoil their lives.

We are born to live, we are born to understand, we are born to carry a cursed pattern and be transformed by pain.

Man is perishing. That may be, and if it is nothingness that awaits us let us so act that it will be an unjust fate.

I could believe only in the hell I was living in, a hell on earth, and it was man-made, not God-made.