Czech Literature Quotes

Certainty. Life's last and kindest gift.

A person's destiny often ends before his death.

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

Nikdy nemějte strach zavřít staré dveře, otevřít nové a vydat se objevovat nové světy a prozkoumávat nové obzory.

Bonifác Strumm nevěřil přespříliš v boha, neviděl ho v sobě ani v jiných. V Satana věřil spíše; připadal mu pravděpodobnější.

If there ever was a man of whom it could be said that he ‘hungered and thirsted after righteousness,’ it was Kafka.

Nejmenuji se; jsem nikdo. Jsem hůř než nikdo, jsem krysař.

I cieli non sono umani e la vita sopra di me e sotto di me e dentro di me neppure.

Krysař může mnoho. Může vyvésti krysy a může vylidniti města. Nemůže však zadržeti čas.

Bylo to určení rybářovo. A neuniknete určení.

The greater the poem, the greater the poet,/and not the contrary!’ he added,/'And you are already a great poet if you ask yourself with/whom you are to be lost...

There is an endless chain of cities, a circle without beginning or end, over which there breaks unrelentingly a shifting wave of laws. There is the city-jungle and the city where people live in the pillars of tall viaducts that crisscross each other in countless overpasses and underpasses, the city of sounds and nothing else, the city in the swamp, the city of smooth white balls rolling on concrete, the city comprising apartments spread across several continents, the city where sculptures fall endlessly from dark clouds and smash on the paving stones, the city where the moon’s path passes through the insides of apartments. All cities are mutually the center and periphery, beginning and end, capital and colony of each other.

The tree of possibilities: life as it reveals itself to a man arriving, astonished, at the threshold of his adult life: an abundant treetop canopy filled with bees singing. And he thinks he understands why she never showed him the letters: she wanted to hear the murmur of the tree by herself, without him, because he, Jean-Marc, represented the abolition of all possibilities, he was the reduction, (even though it was a happy reduction) of her life to a single possibility.

The identification we feel towards the places where we live or were born can give us an anchor in a chaotic world and strengthen our connections to family, community, and the generations that preceded and will follow us. At their best, such feelings are a celebration of culture and all that comes with it in the form of literature, language, music, food, folktales, and even the wildlife we associate with our homelands--the eagle in America, for instance, or in the Czech Republic what's left of our lions, wolves, and bears. There is, however, a tipping point, where loyalty to one's own tribe curdles into resentment and hatred, then aggression towards others. That's when Fascism enters the picture, trailed by an assortment of woes, up to and including the Holocaust and global war. Because of that history, postwar statesmen established organizations to make it harder for deluded nationalists to trample on the rights of neighbors. These bodies include the United Nations--hence Truman's speech--and regional institutions in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

I have a habit, before leaving my flat in Prague, of checking three times to make sure I’ve shut off the gas stove, that I’ve turned off the lights in the bathroom and the water closet, and that I’ve locked the door, and then I go back once more to check on everything a fourth time, and so now, though I knew that nothing but my swan could possibly be lying there under the snow, I still brushed the snow away with trembling hands and saw the curve of her wing, and I went on brushing the snow away and yes, there was her neck, then I elbowed my way back like a sloth, and now nothing ached anymore but my heart, and so I crawled back from the riverbank to the swan again, and then again, trying to brush away more and more snow from that beautiful snowbound creature who, perhaps for my sake alone, had arranged herself in my sight so that I cried out into the dark morning and realized, bitterly, that the king of Czech comedians could go to claim his advance for this story, not to the Writers’ Publishing House, but to the very center, not of death, but of hell itself, where I will suffer pangs of guilt and remorse and shame that will pursue me into eternity, into the very heart of incalculable consequences.

It is worth nothing that their neologisms, pronounciations and simplified grammar was quickly adopted by both the simplest people in the ports and by the so-called best people; and from the ports this way of speaking spread out into the newspapers and was soon in general use. Even many humans stopped attending to grammatical gender, word endings were dropped, declinations disappeared; our golden youth neglected to say r properly and learned to lisp; few educated people were any longer certain what was meant by 'indeterminism' or 'transcendent', simply because these words, even for human beings, were too long and too hard to pronounce. In short, for good or for ill, the newts became able to speak almost every language of the world according to what coast they lived on. About this time, some of the Czech national newspapers began to complain bitterly, no doubt with good reason, that none of the newts could speak their language. If there were salamanders who could speak Portuguese, Dutch and the languages of other small nations why were there none that could speak Czech? It was true, they conceded in regretful and learned terms, that Czechoslovakia had no sea coasts, and that means there will be no marine newts here, but that does not mean that Czechs should not play the same part in the culture of the world as many of the other nations whose language was being taught to thousands of newts, or perhaps even a greater part. It was only right and proper that the newts should also have some knowledge of Czech culture; but how were they to be informed about it if none of them knew the Czech language? It was not likely that someone somewhere in the world would acknowledge this cultural debt and found a chair in Czech and Czechoslovak literature at one of the newt universities. As the poet puts it, 'Trust no-one in the whole wide world, we have no friends out there'.

From 1579 to 1593 the great work was accomplished of translating the Bible from the original tongues into the Czech language, and this “Kralitz Bible” is the basis of the translation still in use; it became the foundation of Czech literature.

Cerurile nu sunt umane, dar există ceva mai uman decât cerurile, compătimirea și dragostea, pe care le-am uitat și le-am rătăcit.

Modern nationalism swept Europe alongside the flourishing of industrialisation. Across the continent, poets and intellectuals cultivated and often heavily modified vernacular languages to be bearers of 19th century modernity. These guardians of language faced significant challenges in adapting the spoken tongues of the peasantry to the demands of high literature and natural science. The story for the arts is widely known: modern Hungarian, Czech, Italian, Hebrew, Polish and other literatures blossomed in the second half of the century. However, the high valuation for efficiency in the sciences somewhat tamed this incipient Babel ["Absolute English," Aeon, February 4, 2015].

[...] And Faust knows that he will not speak of it, and if so only by a comma, only by a word in a big new book. It is really something like a coat of grey fur over the soul, like the uniform the unknown soldier wears inside him. And so he goes and starts a painting, or a gay little song, or a big new book. Nothing has happened but we always saw if coming All in all India ink is the blood's first sister and song is just as final as life and death and equally without allegory, without transcendence and without fuss.

Oh yes. Venus goes to bed in the Czech Republic.

Besides that, my little girl, picture us being together again sometime, in some little room. If we won't have our old room anymore, don't cry, we'll have another room, we'll always find some beautiful room somewhere together.