Top 15 Václav Havel Quotes

The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility.

Keep the company of those who seek the truth- run from those who have found it

Hope is not a feeling of certainty that everything ends well. Hope is just a feeling that life and work have a meaning.

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

I feel that the dormant goodwill in people needs to be stirred. People need to hear that it makes sense to behave decently or to help others, to place common interests above their own, to respect the elementary rules of human coexistence.

You do not become a ''dissident'' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.

Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not.

The truth is not simply what you think it is; it is also the circumstances in which it is said, and to whom, why, and how it is said.

Vision is not enough, it must be combined with venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps, we must step up the stairs.

As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.

Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy.

The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.

Truth and love will overcome lies and hatred.

You can't spend your whole life criticizing something and then, when you have the chance to do it better, refuse to go near it.

The real test of a man is not when he plays the role that he wants for himself but when he plays the role destiny has for him.