Czech Love Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Czech Love. Here they are! All 40 of them:

All languages that derive from Latin form the word "compassion" by combining the prefix meaning "with" (com-) and the root meaning "suffering" (Late Latin, passio). In other languages, Czech, Polish, German, and Swedish, for instance - this word is translated by a noun formed of an equivalent prefix combined with the word that means "feeling". In languages that derive from Latin, "compassion" means: we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer. Another word with approximately the same meaning, "pity", connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer. "To take pity on a woman" means that we are better off than she, that we stoop to her level, lower ourselves. That is why the word "compassion" generally inspires suspicion; it designates what is considered an inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.
Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
The hero of a David Lodge novel says that you don’t know, when you make love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time. Voting is like that. Some of the Germans who voted for the Nazi Party in 1932 no doubt understood that this might be the last meaningfully free election for some time, but most did not. Some of the Czechs and Slovaks who voted for the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1946 probably realized that they were voting for the end of democracy, but most assumed they would have another chance. No doubt the Russians who voted in 1990 did not think that this would be the last free and fair election in their country’s history, which (thus far) it has been. Any election can be the last, or at least the last in the lifetime of the person casting the vote.
Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century)
Love is something huge You’ll find out that Even if there were revolution in the whole wide world Still somewhere on green grass Lovers would have time to hold hands And lean their heads towards one another.
Jaroslav Seifert
Czech Republics worst pick up line: What's a nice place like this doing around a women like you?
Franz Wisner (How the World Makes Love: . . . And What It Taught a Jilted Groom)
[Large countries'] patriotism is different: they are buoyed by their glory, their importance, their universal mission. The Czechs loved their country not because it was glorious but because it was unknown; not because it was big but because it was small and in constant danger. Their patriotism was an enormous compassion for their country.
Milan Kundera (Ignorance)
The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. To express that fundamental notion most Europeans can utilize a word derived from the Greek (nostalgia, nostalgie) as well as other words with roots in their national languages: añoranza, say the Spaniards; saudade, say the Portuguese. In each language these words have a different semantic nuance. Often they mean only the sadness caused by the impossibility of returning to one's country: a longing for country, for home. What in English is called "homesickness." Or in German: Heimweh. In Dutch: heimwee. But this reduces that great notion to just its spatial element. One of the oldest European languages, Icelandic (like English) makes a distinction between two terms: söknuour: nostalgia in its general sense; and heimprá: longing for the homeland. Czechs have the Greek-derived nostalgie as well as their own noun, stesk, and their own verb; the most moving, Czech expression of love: styska se mi po tobe ("I yearn for you," "I'm nostalgic for you"; "I cannot bear the pain of your absence"). In Spanish añoranza comes from the verb añorar (to feel nostalgia), which comes from the Catalan enyorar, itself derived from the Latin word ignorare (to be unaware of, not know, not experience; to lack or miss), In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don't know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don't know what is happening there. Certain languages have problems with nostalgia: the French can only express it by the noun from the Greek root, and have no verb for it; they can say Je m'ennuie de toi (I miss you), but the word s'ennuyer is weak, cold -- anyhow too light for so grave a feeling. The Germans rarely use the Greek-derived term Nostalgie, and tend to say Sehnsucht in speaking of the desire for an absent thing. But Sehnsucht can refer both to something that has existed and to something that has never existed (a new adventure), and therefore it does not necessarily imply the nostos idea; to include in Sehnsucht the obsession with returning would require adding a complementary phrase: Sehnsucht nach der Vergangenheit, nach der verlorenen Kindheit, nach der ersten Liebe (longing for the past, for lost childhood, for a first love).
Milan Kundera (Ignorance)
Krysař může mnoho. Může vyvésti krysy a může vylidniti města. Nemůže však zadržeti čas.
Viktor Dyk
Láska je potenciální síla ve skutečné slabosti.
Thomas Hardy
in Czech we have an expression, propadnout lásce, to fall in love. You can’t do that in German, can you? In German you just come into love. But in Czech you can fall into it.
Simon Mawer (The Glass Room)
I'm not your blue-eyed Czech, I'm just a brown-eyed girl, A little mix of rock your world, And now you'll never be the same. You grabbed me by the hand, I grabbed you by the neck. I changed the game, and your convictions. So is it criminal to steal a heart or two? I keep them on the shelf, Like only hunters do. I like it hard I like you high I love your mouth When it's on mine. I wanna hear you make that sound, Cause it's the greatest thing around. Take it off now, Take from here. Watch your head spin When I come near, And you will lose every time, Cause I won't stop until your mine. And they say who the hell is she? They either love me or they hate me. But still they never look away, This vixen's gonna give you everything.
Crystal Woods (Better to be able to love than to be loveable)
Satanism, in principle, is a perverse projection of the Law into matter. Therefore, even this path has its aesthetic elements. For there are also artists of evil, artists who can give flowing blood the magic of a crimson evening afterglow—adepts of delusion, who with a mere sight, evoke the seductive song of Death and loathsome orgies turn into a wild cascade of ardent memories.
Pierre de Lasenic (Sexual Mysteries: Oriental Love & Sexual Magic (Czech Hermetics, Vol. 1))
All languages that derive fromLatin form the word 'compassion' by combining the prefix meaning 'with' (com-) and the root meaning 'suffering' (Late Latin, passio). In other languages- Czech, Polish, German, and Swedish, for instance- this word is translated by a noun formed of an equivalent prefixcombined with the word that means 'feeling' (Czech, sou-cit; Polish, wsspół-czucie; German, Mit-gefühl; Swedish, medkänsla). In languages that derive from Latin, 'compassion' means: we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer. Another word with approximately the same meaning, 'pity' (French, pitié; Italian, pietà; etc.), connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer. 'To take pity on a woman' means that we are better off than she, that we stoop to her level, lower ourselves. That is why the word 'compassion' generally inspires suspicion; it designates what is considered an inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love. In languages that form the word 'compassion' not from the root 'suffering' but from the root 'feeling', the word is used in approximately the same way, but to contend that it designates a bad or inferior sentiment is difficult. The secret strength of its etymology floods the word with another light and gives it a broader meaning: to have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with the other's misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion- joy, anxiety, happiness, pain. This kind of compassion (in the sense of soucit, współczucie, Mitgefühl, medkänsla) therefore signifies the maximal capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional telepathy. In the hierarchy of sentiments, then, it is supreme. By revealing to Tomas her dream about jabbing needles under her fingernails, Tereza unwittingly revealed that she had gone through his desk. If Tereza had been any other woman, Tomas would never have spoken to her again. Aware of that, Tereza said to him, 'Throw me out!' But instead of throwing her out, he seized her and kissed the tips of her fingers, because at that moment he himself felt the pain under her fingernails as surely as if the nerves of her fingers led straight to his own brain. Anyone who has failed to benefit from the the Devil's gift of compassion (co-feeling) will condemn Tereza coldly for her deed, because privacy is sacred and drawers containing intimate correspondence are not to be opened. But because compassion was Tomas's fate (or curse), he felt that he himself had knelt before the open desk drawer, unable to tear his eyes from Sabina's letter. He understood Tereza, and not only was he incapable of being angry with her, he loved her all the more.
Milan Kundera
The hero of a David Lodge novel says that you don’t know, when you make love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time. Voting is like that. Some of the Germans who voted for the Nazi Party in 1932 no doubt understood that this might be the last meaningfully free election for some time, but most did not. Some of the Czechs and Slovaks who voted for the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1946 probably realized that they were voting for the end of democracy, but most assumed they would have another chance.
Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century)
We also learned our own history and I was so grateful that such richness comes from our family stories. Now we will forever remember the day that a Russian cellist spoke the heart of Czech people. Rostropovich loved Prague and so he viewed that performance as a personal tragedy.
Kytka Hilmar-Jezek (CELLOGIRLS: Identity and Transformation in 2CELLOS Fan Culture (The Original 2CELLOS Fan Anthology Book 1))
True love logically gives the premise of wishing for the best that life can offer; – but [this] desire is something [we give] to the person we love and not to ourselves. – Today, the words, "I love you," are inexplicably mistaken for "I want you unconditionally for me alone;" and that is the root of all jealousy that has cost so many lives, ideals, and happiness.
Pierre de Lasenic (Sexual Mysteries: Oriental Love & Sexual Magic (Czech Hermetics, Vol. 1))
A man who restricts the freedom of his mistress or wife, by any prohibition, rings the death knell of his "eternal love" in advance, which was not strong enough to pass beyond the limits of his own personal egotism. In most cases, this jealous selfishness first flatters young women; but her ideal will be trampled on as soon as she admires his insane fear of his own impotent jealousy.
Pierre de Lasenic (Sexual Mysteries: Oriental Love & Sexual Magic (Czech Hermetics, Vol. 1))
He was looking for immensity. His life was hopelessly small, everything surrounding him was nondescript and gray. And death is absolute; it is indivisible and indissoluble. The presence of the girl was pathetic (a few caresses and a lot of meaningless words), but her absolute absence was infinitely grand; when he imagined a girl buried in a field, he suddenly discovered the nobility of pain and the grandeur of love. But it was not only the absolute but also bliss he was looking for in his dreams of death.
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 (Laughable Loves)
Well, we do need to find a new lair for your treasure.” She knew he didn't want to leave his homeland, but she would make him squirm for just a few minutes. “I hear the middle of nowhere Nebraska has a large population of Czech people. They even have Nebraska Czech Days, where we can eat goulash and kledniki and kolaches.” She only knew all of this because she'd had a young lady from Clarkson, Nebraska who needed to have a big fat Bohemian wedding.
Aidy Award (Chase Me (Dragons Love Curves #1))
There was an astounding variety to go through. He had seen a fat one addressed to Paris—the envelope sealed with a Christmas tree sticker. A card to the Czech Republic. And one to India. Another of Morley's. A small red envelope going to England. A lot to the United States. A lot more for Canada. Another of Morley's. And a second, in a child's printing, addressed to the North Pole. It was affecting. All of them presumably said the same thing. The one thing that is so hard to say in person, but that everyone says at the bottom of a card: love. Love, me. Love, you. Love, Dave. Love, Stuart.
Stuart McLean (Christmas at the Vinyl Cafe)
All languages that derive from Latin form the word “compassion” by combining the prefix meaning “with” (com-) and the root meaning “suffering” (Late Latin, passio). In other languages—Czech, Polish, German, and Swedish, for instance—this word is translated by a noun formed of an equivalent prefix combined with the word that means “feeling” (Czech, sou-cit; Polish, współ-czucie; German, Mit-gefühl; Swedish, med-känsla). In languages that derive from Latin, “compassion” means: we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer. Another word with approximately the same meaning, “pity” (French, pitié; Italian, pietà; etc.), connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer. “To take pity on a woman” means that we are better off than she, that we stoop to her level, lower ourselves. That is why the word “compassion” generally inspires suspicion; it designates what is considered an inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love. In languages that form the word “compassion” not from the root “suffering” but from the root “feeling,” the word is used in approximately the same way, but to contend that it designates a bad or inferior sentiment is difficult. The secret strength of its etymology floods the word with another light and gives it a broader meaning: to have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with the other’s misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion—joy, anxiety, happiness, pain. This kind of compassion (in the sense of soucit, współczucie, Mitgefühl, medkänsla) therefore signifies the maximal capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional telepathy. In the hierarchy of sentiments, then, it is supreme.
Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
Eventually the talent supply runs out and you have to look elsewhere for the right team. Fortunately, there are some terrific sources of outstanding product talent in places such as India, Eastern Europe (especially the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia), Northern Europe (especially the Netherlands, Sweden, and Germany), Israel, China, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand.
Marty Cagan (Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love)
Drinks DUI expert group to help guide However, the best men s and women s drunken food you like it petty crimes, other traffic violations on the wrong goal that seems to be the direction. If you see that the light sentences and fines to get website traffic is violated, the citizen towards crime. When under the influence of a great interest behind the violation was due to more significant impact. Prison term effects were stuck down the back of people who are well, these licenses is likely that you want to deal with nutrition break and automated attacks can be, that s why. Yes it is expensive insurance, and other options in the outcome of the order of DUI, in everyday life, it affects people and the need to process, I love you. An experienced legal drunk driving charges, and it was presented to a lawyer immediately after the contract has announced that although his own. You are trying to remember the legal rights towards the maximum is very cool, you must be straight. The alternative thinking in any direction, does not encourage conservation officials as a record on suspicion of drunken driving after turning self, yourself simplest explanation, it may be possible to do so until is. His car really only answer whether the director should start by asking, encourages statement. A judgment is impaired, you probably have a file, you can use your account to say that the elements can get. When he finished, completely, their legal rights, and in a quiet warehouse to check their own direction and I will speak, and the optimal route is being used against itself. Most use a positive direction, you might think it accuses because your self, and also to examine the consequences of drinking have been able to rule out the presence of blood. Of course, as long as you do not accept the claims are by drinking in the area, they are deprived of a lawyer. Additional measures will not fix it claims that his lawyer, the Czech-out you can. Therefore, it is also within the laws of their country to be aware of your car. Owned independent certification system will be canceled. It can record their own and as an alternative to the paper license, driving license, was arrested for drunken driving, the licensee, are confiscated in accordance with the direction. License, for how long, but canceling function is based on the severity of their crime. But even apart from some a license, you completely lose its supply is proposed well motivated are not sure. Your sins, so not only is it important for your car can pass only confiscated. DUI price of any of the reception towards obtaining a driving license, DMV hearing is removed again, but the case was registered, although this aspect of themselves independently as a condition of. The court file, however, take care of yourself, as well as independent experts was chosen to listen to their constitution.
Amanda Flowers
Take Tom Jones and mix him with Enrico Caruso, the Italian tenor-cum-castrato singer. Then add tons of pathetic love songs, faked sex appeal and musical kleptomania focusing on Western hits from the 1970s. Spice it up with a political flexibility rare even for Central European standards and a personal status close to that of the Pope. What do you get? Karel Gott, Czech pop music's most mega-super, long-lasting and brightest star.
Terje B. Englund (The Czechs in a Nutshell)
Each country has its own extradition treaty with the US and various levels of cooperation. The consensus pick for the most extradition-friendly country in Europe was, interestingly, the Czech Republic. Apparently, all countries from the former Soviet bloc have a great deal of respect for the American system of justice and trust the fairness and due process afforded criminal defendants here.
Matt Murphy (The Book of Murder: A Prosecutor's Journey Through Love and Death)
All of these inspirations, along with a love for the place, the people and their history, have found their way into the books she’s written, which have been translated into German, Norwegian, Czech, Turkish and Slovenian. Fiona now lives in Scotland, but
Fiona Valpy (The Beekeeper's Promise)
The first human used two principles, the simplest possible system, because abstract thinking did not belong to his strengths. We could even say that they did not need it. Their spirit lived in the spiritual world, while their body was doing whatever they wanted, or whatever they had been forced to do when cold and hungry… He was allowed to be doing the things that he wanted, for his will was the Great Will, the Will of God. Although, like the others, I am not allowed to lift the pall that covers the Tradition of the First, we can be sure that it contains the basic rules of sexual life which, from the perspective of our comfortable workrooms, appears to be the basic laws of sexual magic. And this magic that is infinitely simple and infinitely powerful, produced an immense miracle—that we’re here.
Lukáš Loužecký (Sexual Mysteries: Oriental Love & Sexual Magic (Czech Hermetics, Vol. 1))
Today’s man is absorbed in abstraction, and lives in his virtual world, far from the goals of hermeticism, and equally distant from the spirit and from nature. Liquid crystals, in the abstract sense, caused the same thing to occur, like in Egyptian antiquity, with the long copper hook of the embalmer… 'Our man' would like to see all of the mysteries of antiquity immediately and fully because his own era is not enough! This departure of the brain from the skull (or to use abstract terms: the atrophy of the intellect), can explain the behavior of our contemporaries: drug experiments led by materialistic logic, various forms of folk magic (a false part of Neo-paganism, healing with cracked crystals, calling angels in groups of absolutely undisciplined participants) and a large increase of interest in 'the mysteries of sex'.
Lukáš Loužecký (Sexual Mysteries: Oriental Love & Sexual Magic (Czech Hermetics, Vol. 1))
Dopis Píši Ti píši psaní jsem tak rád na světě zdá se mi o líbání o tom co vykvete Je to už skoro měsíc co jsme se viděli Je to už jistě měsíc Bylo to v neděli Žijeme u nás tiše a tak si člověk píše o trošku naděje Zapomněl jsem Ti sdělit že Tě mám strašně rád s nikým se nechci dělit a chci Ti všechno dát Kéž bych Ti mohl říci všecko co cítívám Pošleš mi pohlednici? Sbohem už usínám IX. svazek Spisů; Básnické juvenilie
Jiří Orten (Spisy)
Our very special love-friendship continued for many years after my emigration, in letters. In his witty, crystalline Czech prose he kept me connected to what I had left, and what I needed to forget so that I could remember it again, without pain.
Elena Lappin (What Language Do I Dream In?)
In grief, there is an element of inconsolability. In our needs, there is an element of unsatisfiability. In the face of life’s most profound questions, there is an unknowability. This fits with the work of Kurt Gödel, the Czech mathematician, who confirmed the “incompleteness theorem,” which states that in any mathematical system there are indeed propositions that can neither be proved nor disproved. These natural incompletions reflect the first noble truth of Buddhism about the enduring and ineradicable unsatisfactoriness of all experience. This is not only Buddha’s truth, it is the one that some of our children and punk rockers also proclaim. Yet there is a positive side. Inconsolability means we cannot forget but always cherish those we loved. Unsatisfiability means we have a motivation to transcend our immediate desires. Unknowability means we grow in our sense of wonder and imagination. Indeed, answers close us, but questions open us. In accepting the given of the first noble truth without protest, blame, or recourse to an escape to which we can attach, we win all the way around.
David Richo (When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds That Sabotage Our Relationships)
On a frosty December morning, with her best handbag, hat, and a small suitcase she handed over the keys to their flat to her maid and asked her to keep their most precious belongings safe there... Then she joined the disorderly progression of Jews heading for the Veletržní palác. Instead of taking something necessary and useful like tinned fish or packet soup, Anka carried a large hat box tied with string. In it were three dozen of her maid's delicious sugar-coated donuts, [her husband's] favorite treat... The young bride kept brushing her hair and reapplying her makeup. [The people around her] were even more intrigued when she knelt on the floor in her fine stockings to use her eyelash curlers. "I just wanted to look my best for the man I loved." A passage about Anka Bergman, a Czech Holocaust survivor, being transferred to the Theresienstadt ghetto
Wendy Holden (Born Survivors)
On a frosty December morning, with her best handbag, hat, and a small suitcase she handed over the keys to their flat to her maid and asked her to keep their most precious belongings safe there... Then she joined the disorderly progression of Jews heading for the Veletržní palác. Instead of taking something necessary and useful like tinned fish or packet soup, Anka carried a large hat box tied with string. In it were three dozen of her maid's delicious sugar-coated donuts, [her husband's] favorite treat... The young bride kept brushing her hair and reapplying her makeup. [The people around her] were even more intrigued when she knelt on the floor in her fine stockings to use her eyelash curlers. "I just wanted to look my best for the man I loved." A passage about Anka Bergman, a Czech Holocaust survivor, being transferred to the Theresienstadt ghetto.
Wendy Holden
My grandfather Alexander and my grandmother Shlomit, with my father and his elder brother David, on the other hand, did not go to Palestine even though they were also ardent Zionists: the conditions of life there seemed too Asiatic to them, so they went to Vilna, the capital of Lithuania, and arrived there only in 1933, by which time, as it turned out, anti-Semitism in Vilna had grown to the point of violence against Jewish students. My Uncle David especially was a confirmed European, at a time when, it seems, no one else in Europe was, apart from the members of my family and other Jews like them. Everyone else turns out to have been Pan-Slavic, PanGermanic, or simply Latvian, Bulgarian, Irish, or Slovak patriots. The only Europeans in the whole of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s were the Jews. My father always used to say: In Czechoslovakia there are three nations, the Czechs, the Slovaks, and the Czecho-Slovaks, i.e., the Jews; in Yugoslavia there are Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Montenegrines, but, even there, there lives a group of unmistakable Yugoslavs; and even in Stalin’s empire there are Russians, there are Ukrainians, and there are Uzbeks and Chukchis and Tatars, and among them are our brethren, the only real members of a Soviet nation.
Amos Oz (A Tale of Love and Darkness)
But Haresh stood alone: Umesh Uncle, Simran, his foster-father, all these figures whom she felt she knew, could turn out to be entirely different from what she had imagined. And his family of conservative Old Delhi khatris: how could she possibly behave with them as she behaved with Kuku or Dipankar or Mr Justice Chatterji? What would she talk about to the Czechs? But there was something adventurous in losing herself entirely in a world that she did not know with a man whom she trusted and had begun to admire — and who cared for her so deeply and steadily. She thought of a paan-less Haresh, smiling his open smile; she sat him down at a table so that she could not see his co-respondent shoes; she ruffled his hair a bit, and — well, he was quite attractive! She liked him. Perhaps, given time and luck, she could even learn to love him.
Vikram Seth (A Suitable Boy (A Bridge of Leaves, #1))
A study published in The British Medical Journal examined the beer-drinking habits of a group of people who had suffered heart attacks and the beer-drinking habits of a group randomly selected from the Czech population. The Czech Republic is especially appropriate for such a study, because it is a country where beer is the beverage of choice. Perhaps surprisingly, in both groups the lowest risk of heart attack was found among the men who drank nine to twenty pints a week. Their risk was a third of that seen in the men who never drank beer. But if they drank more, they lost that protection and developed problems. Dark beer seems to be especially protective. Researchers discovered that it even reduces the potential harm caused by the notorious heterocyclic aromatic amines (HAAs) that form when food is heated to a high temperature. Serving dark beer at a barbecue is a good idea. Maybe Benjamin Franklin was on to something when he said, “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.â€
Joe Schwarcz (That's the Way the Cookie Crumbles: 62 All-New Commentaries on the Fascinating Chemistry of Everyday Life)
So from morning onward I’m kept company by pictures of weather fronts, lovely abstract lines on maps, blue ones and red ones, relentlessly approaching from the west, from over the Czech Republic and Germany. They carry the air that Prague was breathing a short while ago, maybe Berlin too. It flew in from the Atlantic and crept across the whole of Europe, so one could say we have sea air up here, in the mountains. I particularly love it when they show maps of pressure, which explain a sudden resistance to getting out of bed or an ache in the knees, or something else again—an inexplicable sorrow that has just the same character as an atmospheric front, a moody figura serpentinata within the Earth’s atmosphere.
Olga Tokarczuk (Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead)
Bands were first forced to abandon their repertoire of Anglo-American standards and covers and obliged to sing in Czech, a lovely and poetic language, albeit with a pronounced shortage of one-word rhymes that does not lend itself easily to rocking rhythms.
Michael Žantovský (Havel: A Life)
Yet some few were foreigners, Hungarians, Germans, Czechs, long pale Swedes, concerned with the arts and in quest of particular artists: some looked for Picasso, and some of those who found him asked him to explain his painting—what did it mean? All his life he loathed questions of this kind, and all his life he was plagued with them. “Everyone wants to understand art,” he cried angrily. “Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of painting people have to understand…
Patrick O'Brian (Picasso: A Biography)
Do what you love, and excel in it.
Adam Harkus (Prague: The Musical City)