Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
Hope is not a feeling of certainty that everything ends well. Hope is just a feeling that life and work have a meaning.
Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
Isn't it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope; perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing its absurdity.
Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it. It is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it.
The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.
But if I were to say who influenced me most, then I'd say Franz Kafka. And his works were always anchored in the Central European region.
Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have - by disrupting that order - a way of surprising.
Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations. Without internal peace, that is, peace among citizens and between the citizens and the state, there can be no guarantee of external peace.
The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.
When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete.
As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.
Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not.
What's certain is that a totalitarian enclave like Cuba's can't continue to exist, so change will definitely come there, eventually.
There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.
The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.
I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.
Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good.
Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy.
Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life.
