But the people who struggle against what we call totalitarian regimes cannot function with queries and doubts. They, too, need certainties and simple truths to make the multitudes understand, to provoke collective tears.
It takes a very great intelligence to breathe logical meaning into meaningless ideas.
Poetry never plays a more important role than it does during revolutionary periods; poetry gave the revolution its voice and in return the revolution liberated poetry from isolation; the poet now knows he is being heard by the people, especially young people; for youth, poetry and revolution are one and the same.
The novel is born not of the theoretical spirit but of the spirit of humor.
Metaphors are not to be trifled with.
Because love means renouncing strength.
Every situation is of man’s making and can only contain what man contains.
Nowadays, people no longer know Beethoven’s Ninth from concerts, but form the for lines of the ‘Ode to Joy’ that they hear every day in the ad for Bella Perfume.
I know you’re quiet a workman on God’s eternal construction site and don’t like hearing about demolition, but what can I do? Myself, I’m not one of God’s bricklayers. Besides, if God’s bricklayers built real walls, I doubt we’d be able to demolish them. But instead of walls all I see is stage sets. And stage sets are made to be demolished.
The day was lit with the beauty of the land forsaken, the night by the horror of returning to it. The day would show her the paradise she had lost; the night, the hell she had fled.
We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same.
Let us therefore agree that the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than as we know them: they appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature. This mitigating circumstance prevents us from coming to a verdict. For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
The way contemporary history is told is like a huge concert where they present all of Beethoven’s one hundred thirty-eight opuses one after the other, but actually play just the first eight bars of each.
Her beauty, which struck him at the time, did not make her look younger than her age; he might sooner have said that her age made her beauty more eloquent.
What is a novel if not a trap for catching a hero?
Einmal ist keinmal. What happens but once might as well not have happened at all. The history of the Czechs will not be repeated, nor will the history of Europe. The history of the Czechs and of Europe is a pair of sketches from the pen of mankind’s fateful inexperience, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.
To ensure that erotic friendship never grew into the aggression of love, he would only meet each of his long-term mistresses only at long intervals. He considered this method flawless and propagated it among his friends: “the important thing is to abide by the rules of threes. Either you see a woman three times in quick succession and then never again, or you maintain relations over the years but make sure that the rendezvous are at least three weeks apart.
Is it better to shout and thereby hasten the end, or to keep silent and gain thereby a slower death?
Porque vivir en un mundo donde no se le perdona nada a nadie, donde nadie puede redimirse, es lo mismo que vivir en el infierno.
I used to admire believers,” Tomas continued, “I thought they had an odd transcendental way of perceiving things which was closed to me. Like clairvoyants, you might say. But my son’s experience proves that faith is actually quite a simple matter. He was down and out, the Catholics took him in, and before he knew it, he had faith. So it was gratitude that decided the issue, most likely. Human decisions are terribly simple.
The first betrayal is irreparable. It calls forth a chain reaction of further betrayals, each of which takes us farther and farther away from.