Quotes by Czech Authors - Page 2

The books we need are of the kind that act upon us like a misfortune,that makes us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide,lost in a forest remote from all human habitation
Franz Kafka
For a trial is initiated not to render justice but to annihilate the defendant.Even when the trial is of dead people, the point is to kill them off a second time: by burning their books; by removing their names from the schoolbooks; by demolishing their monuments; by rechristening the streets that bore their names.
Milan Kundera
When you go to buy use your eyes not your ears.
Czech Proverb
Certainty. Life's last and kindest gift.
Milan Kundera
In a way, I was safe writing
Franz Kafka
Most people willingly deceive themselves with a doubly false faith; they believe in eternal memory (of men, things, deeds, peoples) and in rectification (of deeds, errors, sins, injustice). Both are sham. The truth lies at the opposite end of the scale: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be rectified. All rectification (both vengeance and forgiveness) will be taken over by oblivion.
Milan Kundera
I think the key is for women not to set any limits.
Martina Navratilova
People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as 'nauseatingly miserable beyond repair'.
Franz Kafka
Learning to love yourself is easier when you have someone to show you how.
Martina Boone
Family is always a mirror. You can hide from other people, you can even hide from yourself, but your family is going to reflect what you’re doing right back at you.
Martina Boone
The primary difference I see is that unschooling is an invitation to awaken and ennoble capabilities that exist within the child. Where traditional schooling is to fill the child with facts that we, as a collective have decided upon.
Kytka Hilmar-Jezek
One tells as few lies as possible only by telling as few lies as possible and not by having the least possible opportunity to do so.
Franz Kafka
An increasing number of people are taking advantage of having a leg up on their competition by branding themselves as "the expert" in their particular niche. Call it a business card, a resume, a billboard, or whatever you choose, but the long and short of it is that books are no longer just books. They are branding devices and credibility builders, not to mention door openers. Books are the reason that authors command large speaking and consulting fees.
Kytka Hilmar-Jezek
No sooner is it a little calmer with me than it is almost too calm as though I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy
Franz Kafka
If someone gave you the rules to the game you have been playing right away, you would miss the most exciting part – the details. Sometimes it’s all about the details, they make the whole more meaningful.
Iva Kenaz
I hope you have a book telling others how you do what you do. If you answered no, then I challenge you to spend the next couple of hours reading this book and then, in the next ten days implementing what you’ve learned here. When you realize the value of the impact your book will make, your decision to write will be a no-brainer! Using this very simple, powerful system you will soon be thinking about your second book, and third book. You will want to recruit your spouse, children and parents to write. You will understand that everyone has a unique voice whose legacy is to be forever captured in print. They key is to begin. Dreaming about getting started is not going to make it happen. Action is everything so make a promise to yourself to commit and take action.
Kytka Hilmar-Jezek
Every situation is of man's making and can only contain what man contains.
Milan Kundera
Some people know they'll live until spring and that's all they need to be happy. When I was feeling good, I just let the sun go down, knowing I'd see it again next morning. When I felt worse, and it didn't matter for what reasons, every sunset seemed to me like the end of the world. Maybe it's true, that the world dies every day at evening and is born again in the morning. But not always for everybody.
Arnošt Lustig
Let the planet be convulsed with exploding bombs, the country ravished daily by new hordes, all his neighbors taken out and shot - he could accept it all more easily than he dared to admit. But the grief implicit in Tereza's dream was something he could not endure.
Milan Kundera
He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
Milan Kundera
He looks at houses, chateaus, forests, and thinks about the countless generations who used to see those things and who are gone now; and he understands that everything he is seeing is oblivion; pure oblivion, the oblivion whose absolute state will soon be achieved, the moment he himself is gone. And again I think about the obvious idea (that astoundingly obvious idea) that everything that exists (nation, thought, music) can also not exist.
Milan Kundera
We've lost a lot of years, but you can't lose love. Not real love. It stays locked inside you, ready for whenever you are strong enough to find it again.
Martina Boone
They all had a thousand good economic and political reasons why they couldn’t stop. I’m not a politician or a businessman; how am I supposed to persuade them about these things. What are we supposed to do; quite likely the world will collapse and disappear under water; but at least that will happen for political and economic reasons we can all understand, at least it will happen with the help of science, technology and public opinion, with human ingenuity of all sorts! Not some cosmic catastrophe but just the same old reasons to do with the struggle for power and money and so on. There’s nothing we can do about that.
Karel Čapek
Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.
Ernest Gellner
Not everything written on Kafka is Kafkology. How then to define Kafkology? By a tautology: Kafkology is discourse for Kafkologizing Kafka. For replacing Kafka with the Kafkologized Kafka.
Milan Kundera
The physical contact with people who struck and trampled and killed one another seemed far worse to him than a solitary death in the purity of the waters.
Milan Kundera
Fortunately, I read (the books) without knowing what I was in for, and the best thing that can ever happen to a reader happened to me: I loved something that, by conviction (or by my nature) I should not have loved
Milan Kundera
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.
Milan Kundera
For there is a general desire to be endlessly remembered and endlessly repeatable.
Vilém Flusser
One idiot is one idiot. Two idiots are two idiots. Ten thousand idiots are a political party.
Franz Kafka
When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
Milan Kundera
And think about the precise meaning of that term: a Narcissus is not proud. A proud man has disdain for other people, he undervalues them. The Narcissus overvalues them, because in every person's eyes he sees his own image, and wants to embellish it. So he takes nice care of all his mirrors.
Milan Kundera
Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
Franz Kafka
Just imagine the silence in the world, if people talked only what they knew
Karel Čapek
Ultimately, wasn’t dance a whispered question? A story told through the position of a foot, the tilt of a head, the touch of a hand, the brush of an eye. A rite of passage. A claiming.
Martina Boone
A garden is never finished. In that sense it is like the human world and all human undertakings.
Karel Čapek
You certainly remember this scene from dozens of films: a boy and a girl are running hand in hand in a beautiful spring (or summer) landscape. Running, running, running and laughing. By laughing the two runners are proclaiming to the whole world, to audiences in all the movie theaters: "We're happy, we're glad to be in the world, we're in agreement with being!" It's a silly scene, a cliche, but it expresses a basic human attitude: serious laughter, laughter "beyond joking."All churches, all underwear manufacturers, all generals, all political parties, are in agreement about that kind of laughter, and all of them rush to put the image of the two laughing runners on the billboards advertising their religion, their products, their ideology, their nation, their sex, their dishwashing powder.
Milan Kundera
How was she to reconcile men's desire with the desire to be beautiful in their eyes? At first she had tried for a compromise (desperate journeys abroad, where nobody knew her and no indiscretion could betray her); then, later on, she had gone radical and sacrificed her erotic life to her beauty.
Milan Kundera
As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about. But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?
Milan Kundera
Misfortunes always come in by a door that has been left open for them.
Czech Proverb
Realism is knowing fantasy and reality intersect constantly. Realism is living with the awareness that every act changes the world.
Ales Kot
Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
Václav Havel
It is only because of their stupidity that they are able to be so sure of themselves.
Franz Kafka
Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.
Franz Kafka
Beauty can get a woman what she wants: love and money. But when beauty leaves you so can the things it brought.
Paulina Porizkova
Nothing, nothing, the whole long day, nothing.
Franz Kafka
Evil is the starry sky of the Good.
Franz Kafka
Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest.
Milan Kundera
The meaning of life is that it ends
Franz Kafka
Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.
Franz Kafka
This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.
Franz Kafka
No book worth its salt is meant to put you to sleep, it's meant to make you jump out of your bed in your underwear and run and beat the author's brains out.
Bohumil Hrabal
If I were a doctor, I would diagnose his condition thus: "The patient is suffering from nostalgic insufficiency.
Milan Kundera
I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be.
Milan Kundera
Those who had fought for what they called the revolution maintained a great pride: the pride of being on the correct side of the front lines. Ten or twelve years later (around the time of our story) the front lines began to melt away, and with them the correct side. No wonder the former supporters of the revolution feel cheated and are quick to seek substitute fronts; thanks to religion they can (in their role as atheists struggling against believers) stand again on the correct side and retain their habitual and precious sense of their own superiority.But to tell the truth, the substitute front was also useful to others, and it will perhaps not be too premature to disclose that Alice was one of them. Just as the directress wanted to be on the correct side, Alice wanted to be on the opposite side. During the revolution they had nationalized her papa's shop, and Alice hated those who had done this to him. But how should she show her hatred? Perhaps by taking a knife and avenging her father? But this sort of thing is not the custom in Bohemia. Alice had a better means for expressing her opposition: she began to believe in God.
Milan Kundera
During last night’s insomnia, as these thoughts came and went between my aching temples, I realised once again, what I had almost forgotten in this recent period of relative calm, that I tread a terribly tenuous, indeed almost non-existent soil spread over a pit full of shadows, whence the powers of darkness emerge at will to destroy my life…
Franz Kafka
It is as if I were made of stone, as if I were my own tombstone, there is no loophole for doubt or for faith, for love or repugnance, for courage or anxiety, in particular or in general, only a vague hope lives on, but no better than the inscriptions on tombstones.
Franz Kafka
Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.
Franz Kafka
Do you think that a doe in the jaws of a tiger feels less horror than you? People thought up the idea that animals don't have the same capability for suffering as humans, because otherwise they couldn't bear the knowledge that they are surrounded by a world of nature that is horror and nothing but horror." Paul was pleased that man was gradually covering the whole earth with concrete. It was as if he were watching a cruel murderess being walled up.
Milan Kundera