Czech Quotes

In Czech, according to Milan Kundera, litost is a state of agony and torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery. ~ Rabih Alameddine

Czech Republic is an important part of central Europe. It's clear that we must participate in European integration. I am convinced that the Czech Republic - or, in the past, Czechoslovakia - would have been one of the founding members of the EU if it hadn't been for the communist takeover in 1948. ~ Vaclav Klaus

The Czech Republic are coming from behind in more than one way now. ~ John Motson

She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with walls and become a house she can live in. Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death. ~ Milan Kundera

She's a legend. She's really huge in the Czech Republic. Everywhere, actually. ~ Petra Kvitova

At last either Betsie or I would open the Bible. Because only the Hollanders could understand the Dutch text, we would translate aloud in German. And then we would hear the life-giving words passed back along the aisles in French, Polish, Russian, Czech, back into Dutch. They were little previews of heaven, these evenings beneath the lightbulb. ~ Corrie Ten Boom

Walker-thinkers have found various ways to accommodate the gifts that their walking brings. Caught paperless on his walks in the Czech enclaves of Iowa, maestro Dvořák scribbles the string quartets that visited his brain on his starched white shirt cuffs (so the legend goes). More proactively, Thomas Hobbes fashioned a walking stick for himself with an inkwell attached, and modern poet Mary Oliver leaves pencils in the trees along her usual pathways, in case a poem descends during her rambles. ~ Lyanda Lynn Haupt

There is this huge Roma problem in Europe. There are a lot of Romas who are discriminated against in countries like the Czech Republic or Hungary. They are an ethnic minority that in Europe everyone loves to hate. ~ Evgeny Morozov

I still speak Czech with my parents because I was born there. ~ Martina Hingis

Czech Republics worst pick up line: What's a nice place like this doing around a women like you? ~ Franz Wisner

The Czech Republic is a dynamic United Nations Member State, active on the Human Rights Council, contributing to the peaceful settlement of disputes, and helping other countries to achieve a democratic transition. ~ Ban Ki-moon

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

What could I say? Maybe this: the man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present instant of his flight; he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future; he is wrenched from the continuity of time; he is outside time; in other words, he is in a state of ecstasy; in that state he is unaware of his age, his wife, his children, his worries, and so he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear. ~ Milan Kundera

I was interested in the ways that artists responded to totalitarianism - the Czech Jazz Section, Romanian absurdist theatre, Brecht's alienation effect. The anything-goes, anarchic qualities of jazz and Surrealism seemed to offer a way to cross some of the forbidden frontiers of Eastern Europe. ~ Nicholas Royle

And at this very moment, like a miracle, the rail-bus appeared. We waved our arms frantically, hardly daring to hope that it would stop. It did stop. We scrambled thankfully on board.
That is the irony of travel. You spend your boyhood dreaming of a magic, impossibly distant day when you will cross the Equator, when your eyes will behold Quito. And then, in the slow prosaic process of life, that day undramatically dawns - and finds you sleepy, hungry and dull. The Equator is just another valley; you aren't sure which and you don't much care. Quito is just another railroad station, with fuss about baggage and taxis and tips. And the only comforting reality, amidst all this picturesque noisy strangeness, is to find a clean pension run by Czech refugees and sit down in a cozy Central European parlor to a lunch of well-cooked Wiener Schnitzel. ~ Christopher Isherwood

The Czech Republic, severed from its old Slovak half, sits in apparent landlocked contentment, inside the European Union but outside the troubled Euro Zone, set into the new Continental mosaic like one of the small sturdy paving stones, just a few inches square, that form the sidewalks under the visitor's ambling feet. ~ Thomas Mallon

A Czech could either work for the Germans, or work for the Germans. ~ Mariusz Szczygiel

The problem is, you have to look at Afghanistan also in a global context where we've canceled basically our missile defense system undercutting the Czech Republic in Poland. We've I think not dealt with Iran with the kind of resolve that would show that we understand the nature of that threat. ~ Rahm Emanuel

Certainty. Life's last and kindest gift. ~ Milan Kundera

This scene expresses the basic situation of immaturity; lyricism is an attempt to face that situation: the individual expelled from the protected enclosure of childhood wishes to enter the world, but at the same time, because he is frightened of it, he fashions an artificial replacement world out of his own verse. He makes his poems revolve around him like the planets around the sun; he becomes the center of a small universe in which nothing is alien, in which he feels as much at home as a child inside its mother, for everything here is fashioned only from the substance of his soul. Here he can accomplish everything that is so difficult "outside;" here he can, like the student Wolker, march with a proletarian crowd to make a revolution and, like the virginal Rimbaud, lash his "little girlfriends" because that crowd and those girlfriends are not fashioned out of the hostile substance of an alien world but out of the substance of his own dreams, and they are thus he himself and do not shatter the unity of the universe he has constructed for himself. ~ Milan Kundera

Let's allow Poland and the Czech Republic to have that missile shield that they were entitled to by joining NATO. I think that's the right strategic response to Russian aggression. ~ Mike Pence

When I woke up in the morning I was in bad shape. My neck was stiff and I couldn't turn it. We weren't pros, so there was no such thing as a physical therapist or masseuse to fix it. The best I could do was just rub in some Bengay and hope for the best. When we got to the Czech Republic a couple of days later, my neck still had zero mobility. In order to look to the side, I had to move my entire body. As if that weren't enough to worry about, we were competing against Rachael, who was now teamed up with the Russian guy who had beaten me as a junior. His name was Evgeni Smagin, and he wore his dark hair greased back. The guy just looked slick from head to toe.
I turned to Aneta. "This is so not good," I told her. "They are like the ultimate, ultimate couple. They're going to beat us."
Aneta looked very upset, so I guess something inside me said, "Derek, man up!" My neck was messed up and I was about to get my ass kicked by my archnemesis and my ex. It couldn't get much worse than that. ~ Derek Hough

Well, it's the Czech Republic now, but more specifically Prague. I went there when I was 12. ~ Anwar Robinson

You see, in the Czech Republic, on December fifth, St. Nicholas goes around bringing candy and small gifts to children, accompanied by an angel and a devil. In a holiday tradition that is the stuff of nightmares, the devil threatens to scoop bad children into his sack and carry them to hell. (And you thought coal in your stocking was harsh?) ~ Laini Taylor

He [Vaclav Havel] did love music. And so much about the Czech revolution was about music. ~ Judy Woodruff

All right, Herr Stern, if God made man in His image, which race is most like him? Is a Pole more like him than a Czech? ~ Thomas Keneally

For two years now, my office has had the honour and the privilege of sponsoring seminars on the functioning of government in this country for Eastern Europeans. These seminars and exchanges have brought together representatives from such nations as Bulgaria, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak Republic, Roumania, Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and the Ukraine, all of them anxious to learn what makes a society as diverse as Canada work and how our institutions make it governable. ~ John Allen Fraser

I recruited a Czech kicker, and during the eye exam, when asked to read the bottom line, the kicker replied, Read it? I know him. ~ Woody Hayes

Certainly Amadeus because it was a very powerful time for me, we filmed it in the Czech Republic at a time of lots of social and political change going on in that part of the world. ~ Jeffrey Jones

Visas represent one bureaucratic obstacle, so to say and, if removed, might increase the inflow of Russian money into the Czech economy. And not only Russian money, but Russian tourists, Russian entrepreneurs and so on. ~ Milos Zeman

The truth is not simply what you think it is; it is also the circumstances in which it is said, and to whom, why, and how it is said. ~ Vaclav Havel

Czech: Řekni mi, co čteš, a já ti řeknu, kdo jsi.
English: Tell me what you read, and I'll tell you who you are.

First president of Czechoslovakia. ~ Tomas Garrigue Masaryk

Frank Zappa was one of the gods of the Czech underground, I thought of him as a friend. Whenever I feel like escaping from the world of the Presidency, I think of him. ~ Vaclav Havel

I think we have a good team, but soccer fans will know that we're in a really tough group. The three teams in our group are really strong. The Czech Republic is a very good team, Italy is traditionally a powerhouse, and Ghana is one of the best teams in Africa. ~ Claudio Reyna

We had a poster of the Davis Cup in 1986. It was in Prague, the Czech Republic against Sweden, and we went to watch, so I got the poster. You couldn't get all the posters. You were lucky if you got one. ~ Martina Hingis

Prague does not have its name for no reason - in truth,
Prague is a threshold between the life on Earth
and Heaven, a threshold much thinner and narrower then in any other places… ~ Gustav Meyrink

I went to an English school and was brought up in English. So I don't feel Czech. ~ Tom Stoppard

Who was the real me? I can only repeat: I was a man of many faces.

At meetings I was earnest, enthusiastic, and committed; among friends, unconstrained and given to teasing; with Marketa, cynical and fitfully witty; and alone (and thinking of Marketa), unsure of myself and as agitated as a schoolboy.

Was the last face the real one?

No. They were all real: 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. (I was frightened by the differences between one face and the next; none of them seemed to fit me properly, and I groped my way clumsily among them.) ~ Milan Kundera

How would I explain to him that I couldn't make peace with him? How would I explain that if I did I would immediately lose my inner balance? How would I explain that one of the arms of my internal scales would suddenly shoot upward? How would I explain that my hatred of him counterbalanced the weight of evil that had fallen on my youth? How would I explain that he embodied all the evils in my life? How would I explain to him that I needed to hate him? ~ Milan Kundera

India's linguistic diversity surprises many Westerners, but there are nearly thirty languages in India with at least a million native speakers. There are more native speakers of Tamil on our planet than of Italian. Likewise, more people speak Punjabi than German, Marathi than French, and Bengali than Russian. There are more Telugu speakers than Czech, Dutch, Danish, Finnish, Greek, Slovak, and Swedish speakers combined. ~ Bob Harris

German is my mother tongue and as such more natural to me, but I consider Czech much more affectionate, which is why your letter removes several uncertainties; I see you more clearly, the movements of your body, your hands, so quick, so resolute, it's almost like a meeting. ~ Franz Kafka

What drove such people to their sinister occupations? Spite? Certainly, but also the desire for order. Because the desire for order tries to transform the human world into an inorganic reign in which everything goes well, everything functions as a subject of an impersonal will. The desire for order is at the same time a desire for death, because life is a perpetual violation of order. Or, inversely, the desire for order is a virtuous pretext by which man's hatred for man justifies its crimes. ~ Milan Kundera

If I were to arrive at a foreign country like Czech Republic, I don't have to speak Czech to understand the feeling of the local sensations through architecture. That is a kind of communication that no language can perform. ~ Jimenez Lai

the German Workers' Party. Their principal goal, declared its leader in 1913, was 'the maintenance and increase of [German] living space' (Lebensraum) against the threat posed by Czech Halbmenschen ('half-humans'). This was in fact a response to the creation of a Czech National Socialist Party in 1898. ~ Niall Ferguson

It ain't really Czechoslovakian,' I said, coughing. 'We used to call it the Cheque. Like, you drink it up now, you pay for it later. ~ Esi Edugyan

Many Czech people are very talented. They can do many things, but when they get to a certain level, they are satisfied. I am not like that, thank God. ~ Ivan Lendl

Why should I be frightened of dying? I did not know what death truly was; no one did. Who had made dying a bad word? Yes, it was universally considered awful - unwanted, painful, feared - because when it happened it stopped us from moving and being, and we interpreted that as if something had ended. But what if it were actually a beautiful experience? What if, with death, something actually began instead? ~ Charles Novacek

The designer had probably been going for Turkish Bath but had hit Czech Porn Shoot instead. ~ Ben Aaronovitch

You're a Dark One," said Anton. "All you see in everything is evil, treachery, trickery."

"All I do is not close my eyes to them," Edgar retorted. "And that's why I don't trust Zabulon. I distrust him almost as much as I do Gesar. I can even trust you more - you're just another unfortunate chess piece who happens by chance to be painted a different color from me. Does a white pawn hate a black one? No. Especially if the two pawns have their heads down together over a quiet beer or two."

"You know," Anton said in a slightly surprised voice, "I just don't understand how you can carry on living if you see the world like that. I'd just go and hang myself."

"So you don't have any counterarguments to offer?"

Anton took a gulp of beer too. The wonderful thing about this natural Czech beer was that even if you drank lots of it, it still didn't make your head or your body feel heavy... Or was that an illusion?

"Not a single one," Anton admitted. "Right now, this very moment, not a single one. But I'm sure you're wrong. It's just difficult to argue about the colors of the rainbow with a blind man. There's something missing in you... I don't know what exactly. But it's something very important, and without it you're more helpless than a blind man. ~ Sergei Lukyanenko

I go to Prague every year if I can, value my relationships there like gold, and feel myself in a sense Czech, with all their hopes and needs. They are a people I not only love, but admire. ~ Ellis Peters

This is crossing the Rubicon, after which there will be no more sovereign states in Europe with fully-fledged governments and parliaments which represent legitimate interests of their citizens, but only one State will remain. Basic things will be decided by a remote 'federal government' in Brussels and, for example, Czech citizens will be only a tiny particle whose voice and influence will be almost zero ... We are against a European superstate. ~ Vaclav Klaus

When he told F. of his disgust at the eyelid's movement, he must have been sixteen. When he decided to study medicine, he must have been nineteen; by then, having already signed on to the contract to forget, he no longer remembered what he had said to F. three years before. Too bad for him. The memory might have alerted him, might have helped him see that his choice of medicine was wholly theoretical, made without the slightest self- knowledge.
Thus he studied medicine for three years before giving up with a sense of shipwreck. What to choose after those lost years? What to attach to, if his inner self should keep as silent as it had before? He walked down the broad outside staircase of the medical school for the last time, with the feeling that he was about to find himself alone on a platform all the trains had left. ~ Milan Kundera

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

American girls are much more financially savvy - for example, if a girl went to Paris and she was going to do a fragrance campaign, she would say she wouldn't do it for less than half-a-million dollars. Whereas a girl from the Czech Republic would do it for $100,000. I think that's a really big imbalance that created the demise of the modeling industry - and it also created a gap in giving girls an opportunity to become or gain super-status. ~ Michael Flutie

I have to confess I'm addicted to Sky Sports News. Just the music can pull me in. And then whether it's badminton in the Czech Republic, snail pushing or mole hopping, I'm hooked. ~ Andrew Buchan

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. ~ Milan Kundera

But it was not only a feeling of guilt which drove him into danger. He detested the pettiness that made life semilife and men semimen. He wished to put his life on one of a pair of scales and death on the other. He wished each of his acts, indeed each day, each hour, each second of his life to be measured against the supreme criterion, which is death. That was why he wanted to march at the head of the column, to walk on a tightrope over an abyss, to have a halo of bullets around his head and thus to grow in everyone's eyes and become unlimited as death is unlimited ... ~ Milan Kundera

Milena - what a rich heavy name, almost too full to be lifted, and in the beginning I didn't like it much, it seemed to me a Greek or Roman gone astray in Bohemia, violated by Czech, cheated of its accent, and yet in colour and form it is marvellously a woman, a woman whom one carries in one's arms out of the world, and out of the fire, I don't know which, and she presses herself willingly and trustingly into your arms. ~ Franz Kafka

Well, listen, you know, the Czech saying is, you know, when you are drowning you are grabbing even a little twig. That's what all Czechs were doing, grabbing for ... with the hope for this little twig. ~ Milos Forman

Mom was always doing something for somebody. She came from a Czech background, one that made her a devout Catholic and gave her a strong belief in the family. ~ Eugene Cernan

Well, I'm Czech, but Polish, Czech, no matter, it's my name. ~ Kim Novak

I'd always admired the intellectuals who had made the transition into politics - Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru, Vaclav Havel in the Czech Republic, Carlos Fuentes in Mexico - but I knew that many of them had failed, and in any event, I wasn't exactly in their league. ~ Michael Ignatieff

Regarding 'Ferris Bueller,' I was in the Czech Republic once, in Prague, making a movie at the same time as Jeffrey Jones, who played the principal, who was making a different movie. The Super Bowl was going to be playing at this bar at midnight, so we decided we would go watch the Super Bowl at this bar at midnight in Prague together. ~ Edie McClurg

While twentieth-century physicists were not able to identify any convincing mathematical constants underlying the fine structure, partly because such thinking has normally not been encouraged, a revolutionary suggestion was recently made by the Czech physicist Raji Heyrovska, who deduced that the fine structure constant, ...really is defined by the [golden] ratio .... ~ Carl Johan Calleman

But definitely I was in the zone in the match today. I was still thinking it's the final and I knew the emotions. It's a little bit like Fed Cup when I'm playing in the Czech Republic and I feel the crowd. My stomach is a little bit funny - it's just goosebumps. But when I won the first set, I said to myself, 'Okay, I still have to do the same work.' I was worried I couldn't do it for the whole match, but I did it. ~ Petra Kvitova

If Prague and the rest of Bohemia, with all their charming hospodas delightful architecture and pretty landscape should become too cosy for you, Ostrava, the Czech Republic's third largest city with about 330,000 inhabitants, will rapidly cure your spleen. Tucked away in the country's northeastern corner on the border between Moravia, Silesia and Poland, the former Czechoslovakia's "heart of steel" offers the true flair of the Wild East. As an Australian probably would have put it, this is a city where men are men, and sheep are nervous. ~ Terje B. Englund

Eleanor was all apologies, but Sarah enjoyed seeing a bit more of the Czech countryside. You probably couldn't say that you had really seen a country if all you had seen was a city or two. You had to see where the food was grown, what the riverbanks looked like, and what the highway manners of the inhabitants were. ~ Magnus Flyte

The firepower uncovered in March 2005 in Sant'Anastasia, a town at the foot of Vesuvius, was
stunning. The discovery came about partly by chance, and partly by the lack of discipline of the arms
traffickers: customers and drivers started fighting on the street because they couldn't agree on the
price. When the carabinieri arrived, they removed the interior panels of the truck parked near the
brawl, discovering one of the largest mobile depots they had ever seen. Uzis with four magazines,
seven clips, and 112 380-caliber bullets, Russian and Czech machine guns able to fire 950 shots a
minute. (Nine hundred fifty shots a minute was the firing power of American helicopters in Vietnam.)
Weapons for ripping apart tanks and entire divisions of men, not for Camorra family fights on the
slopes of Mount Vesuvius. Almost new, well-oiled, rifle numbers still intact, just in from Kraków. ~ Roberto Saviano

I do not think that in those early days of September, Hitler was fully aware that he had irrevocably unleashed a world war. He had merely meant to move one step further. To be sure, he was ready to accept the risk associated with that step, just as he had been a year before during the Czech crisis; but he had prepared himself only for the risk, not really for the great war. ~ Albert Speer

Some time after dinner a newsboy rushed into the lobby of the Ambassador with extra editions of a German-language paper, the only one I can read since I do not know Czech. The headlines said: Chamberlain to fly to Berchtesgaden tomorrow to see Hitler! The Czechs are dumbfounded. They suspect a sell-out and I'm afraid they're right. ~ William L. Shirer

I thought of calling this piece "In Memoriam," because "in memoriam" has always suggested a place to me - Memoriam, Oklahoma, say, or Memoriam, Tennessee - and because, to my tinker's brain, "in memoriam," sounds like "in memory am." Which I am, now more than ever. Lost, basically, wandering that ancestral home, all polished wood and anecdote, wishing that I could unload it somehow, knowing I never will. Like it or not, I have an investment in Memoriam now. My father's casket between the potted palms is the cornerstone. Welcome home, kid.

It's an odd, slightly ghostly predicament. Lacking brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, with my mother's memory having long ago lost any trace of me, I find myself the sole surviving owner of ten thousand names, stories, jokes, associations - that time the raccoon reached up through the knothole in the cabin floor when I was four; those Friday nights when the three of us would watch "The Man from U.N.C.L.E."; that evening, a memorable night in 1966, when my dad, with his professorial air and his Czech accent and his horn-rims, put on my mother's shoulder-length blond wig on a dare and went out to pick up the pizza - that mean nothing, except that they were the soil of our lives. ~ Mark Slouka

After 1968 the restored communist regime required all Czech rock musicians to sit a written exam in Marxism Leninism ~ Niall Ferguson

Yet despite its current usage, the @ is not a product of the digital age, and may be almost as old as the ampersand. It had been associated with trade for many centuries, known as an *amphora* or jar, a unit of measurement. Most countries have their own term for it, often linked to food (in Hebrew it is *shtrudl*, meaning strudel, in Czech it is *zavinac* or rollmop herring) or to cute animals (*Affenschwanz* or monkey's tail in German, *snabel-a* meaning "the letter a, with a trunk," in Danish, *sobaka* or dog in Russian,), or both (*escargot* in French). ~ Simon Garfield

The Czech Republic. Czechoslovakia hasn't existed for almost twenty years. So unless her parents are visiting 1992, they're in the Czech Republic. ~ Lauren Morrill