Quote #12

It's not hard to stand behind one's successes. But to accept responsibility for one's failures . . . that is devishly hard! But only thence does the road lead. . . to a radically new insight into the mysterious gravity of my existence as an uncertain enterprise and to its transcendental meaning.

More from Vaclav Havel

  1. If you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become President.
  2. Man is in fact nailed down - like Christ on the Cross - to a grid of paradoxes . . . he balances between the torment of not knowing his mis…
  3. People have passed through a very dark tunnel at the end of which there was a light of freedom. Unexpectedly they passed through the prison…
  4. We are finding out that what looked like a neglected house a year ago is in fact a ruin.
  5. 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 res…
  6. Despite all the political misery I am confronted with every day, it still is my profound conviction that the very essence of politics is no…
  7. I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than …
  8. When a man has his heart in the right place and good taste, he can not only do well in politics but is even predetermined for it. If someon…

All Vaclav Havel quotes