Quotes by Czech Authors

Isn't that exactly the definition of biography? An artificial logic imposed on an 'incoherent succession of images'?
Milan Kundera
The cemetery was vanity transmogrified into stone. Instead of growing more sensible in death, the inhabitants of the cemetery were sillier than they had been in life.
Milan Kundera
Long ago one of the Cynic philosophers strutted through the streets of Athens in a torn mantle to make himself admired by everyone by displaying his contempt for convention. One day Socrates met him and said: 'I see your vanity through the hole in your mantle.' Your dirt too, sir, is vanity, and your vanity is dirty.
Milan Kundera
You never turn away family, no matter how f***ed up they are.
Ronald Velesovsky
Whatever the job you are asked to do at whatever level do a good job because your reputation is your resume.
Madeleine Albright
Whoever said "It's not whether you win or lose that counts " probably lost.
Martina Navratilova
I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.
Franz Kafka
As you go along your road in life you will if you aim high enough also meet resistance ... but no matter how tough the opposition may seem have courage still-and persevere.
Madeleine Albright
Beauty can get a woman what she wants: love and money. But when beauty leaves you so can the things it brought.
Paulina Porizkova
Taking time to live is taking time to appreciate simple silence as better than any kind of talk or watching a flower or watching a guy wash the windows on a skyscraper and wondering what he is thinking.
Gersi Douchan
Mozart is sunshine.
Antonin Dvorak
In the Negro melodies of America I find all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.
Antonin Dvorak
As you go along your road in life you will if you aim high enough also meet resistance ... but no matter how tough the opposition may seem have courage still-and persevere.
Madeleine Albright
Beauty can get a woman what she wants: love and money. But when beauty leaves you so can the things it brought.
Paulina Porizkova
Taking time to live is taking time to appreciate simple silence as better than any kind of talk or watching a flower or watching a guy wash the windows on a skyscraper and wondering what he is thinking.
Gersi Douchan
Mozart is sunshine.
Antonin Dvorak
In the Negro melodies of America I find all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.
Antonin Dvorak
Misfortunes always come in by a door that has been left open for them.
Czech Proverb
To be a man will continue to demand a heroic heart as long as mankind is not quite human.
Julius Fucik
Laughing deeply is living deeply.
Milan Kundera
Dictators are rulers who always look good until the last ten minutes.
Jan Masaryk
Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.
Václav Havel
One must not cheat anybody not even the world of one's triumph.
Franz Kafka
No sooner is it a little calmer with me than it is almost too calm as though I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy
Franz Kafka
I think the key is for women not to set any limits.
Martina Navratilova
Do not protect yourself by a fence but rather by your friends.
Czech Proverb
It is not the thief who is hanged but one who was caught stealing.
Czech Proverb
When you go to buy use your eyes not your ears.
Czech Proverb
Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
Franz Kafka
Nothing, nothing, the whole long day, nothing.
Franz Kafka
Tamina serves coffee and calvados to the customers (there aren't all that many, the room being always half empty) and then goes back behind the bar. Almost always there is someone sitting on a barstool, trying to talk to her. Everyone likes Tamina. Because she knows how to listen to people.But is she really listening? Or is she merely looking at them so attentively, so silently? I don't know, and it's not very important. What matters is that she doesn't interrupt anyone. You know what happens when two people talk. One of them speaks and the other breaks in: "It's absolutely the same with me, I..." and starts talking about himself until the first one manages to slip back in with his own "It's absolutely the same with me, I..."The phrase "It's absolutely the same with me, I..." seems to be an approving echo, a way of continuing the other's thought, but that is an illusion: in reality it is a brute revolt against a brutal violence, an effort to free our own ear from bondage and to occupy the enemy's ear by force. Because all of man's life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ear of others. The whole secret of Tamina's popularity is that she has no desire to talk about herself. She submits to the forces occupying her ear, never saying: "It's absolutely the same with me, I...
Milan Kundera
But what now if all the peace, the comfort, the contentment were to come to a horrible end?
Franz Kafka
Don't be too hasty, don't take somebody else's opinion without testing it.
Franz Kafka
Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.
Ernest Gellner
He yearned to step out of his life the way one steps out of a house into the street.
Milan Kundera
Book authors are in high demand for speaking engagements and appearances; they are the new ‘celebrity’ and celebrities gain access. Authors not only make money from royalties or book advances but from their keynotes, presentations and strategically branded product lines. This includes entrepreneurial ideas for you to extend yourself beyond just writing and prepares you to add speaking and consulting to your revenue stream. You have to begin to look outside book sales and towards the speaking market. There are radio, interviews, news, television, small channel television keynotes, lectures, seminars and workshops. These types of events have the possibility to be much more lucrative than just selling books. In essence, the book builds and brands you in the public eye. It gives you credibility and the opportunity to be more than you are. It enables you to now be a voice, a teacher, a leader, an expert - after all, you wrote the book on it!
Kytka Hilmar-Jezek
Your brand is the unique persona and identity of you, your company, product or service that sets it apart from others in the same market space. It is the image you or your business present to the world. A brand is composed of many different pieces which, together, capture the attention of your buyers. Some of the pieces are physical, but much of branding is intangible; ideas and thoughts put into words, pictures and videos. When small business owners ask themselves “What is branding?” the answer is, “the essence of the business, products or services.” Your personal brand conveys the way you are perceived; and how you want people to see and feel about you, your business and your products or services. You may want to sound very dignified and reinforce your ‘expert status’ and credibility depending on your products or services. Or you may want to sound approachable, edgy and smart. Whatever voice you choose, carry it into all your messaging, marketing materials, and web presence (your platform).
Kytka Hilmar-Jezek
The decision to create a book trailer is entirely up to you. I can remember when "video killed the radio star" on MTV and how excited I was with some music videos (the ones that lived up to or exceeded my imagined vision of the song) and the ones I disliked so much, I even stopped listening to the song (the imagery just ruined it for me!) Some people argue that in a visual landscape, a book trailer is a must, while others stand firm that books should be read and not seen; unless of course it gets made into a screenplay and then a film. The most practical advice is to trust your instinct. You know what you want to say with your book and if it aligns congruently with your brand, then for a non-fiction book it may be a strategic move. On the other hand, it may come off as too "salesy" and go in the opposite direction. As you can see, I still have a love / hate relationship with matching someone else's images to my own imagination. No matter what you decide, remember to keep it aligned with your brand.
Kytka Hilmar-Jezek
Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.
Milan Kundera
Who ever said, ‘It’s not whether you win or lose that counts,’ probably lost.
Martina Navratilova
Writing is a defence against boredom, but it's also a cure for melancholy.
Bohumil Hrabal
It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police. We do not know how to lie.
Milan Kundera
Lost in my dreams, I somehow cross at the traffic signals, bumping into street lamps or people, yet moving onward, exuding fumes of beer and grime, yet smiling, because my briefcase is full of books and that very night I expect them to tell me things about myself I don't know.
Bohumil Hrabal
I see, these books are probably law books, and it is an essential part of the justice dispensed here that you should be condemned not only in innocence but also in ignorance.
Franz Kafka
I believe that we should only read those books that bite and sting us. If a book does not rouse us with a blow then why read it?
Franz Kafka
For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.
Milan Kundera
Biographers know nothing about the intimate sex lives of their own wives, but they think they know all about Stendhal’s or Faulkner’s.
Milan Kundera
Until that day at the dress department Lucie had been many things to me: a child, a source of comfort, a balm, an escape from myself; she was literally everything for me – but a woman. Our love in the physical sense of the word had proceeded no further than the kissing stage. And even the way she kissed was childish (I'd fallen in love with those kisses, long but chaste, with dry closed lips counting each other's fine striations as they touched in emotion).In short, until then I had felt tenderness for Lucie, but no sensual desire; I'd grown so accustomed to its absence that I wasn't even conscious of it; my relationship with Lucie seemed so beautiful that I could never have dreamed anything was missing. Everything fit so harmoniously together: Lucie, her monastically gray clothes, and my monastically chaste relation with her.
Milan Kundera
On her way toward the shore, she kept coming across weekend tourists. Every cluster of them presented the same pattern: the man was pushing a stroller with a baby in it, the woman was walking beside him; the man's expression was meek, solicitous, smiling, a bit embarrassed, and endlessly willing to bend over the child, wipe its nose, soothe its cries; the woman’s expression was blasé, distant, smug, sometimes even (inexplicably) spiteful. This pattern Chantal saw repeated in several variants: the man alongside a woman was pushing the stroller and also carrying another baby on his hack, in a specially made sack: the man alongside a woman was pushing the stroller, carrying one baby on his shoulders and another in a belly carrier: the man alongside a woman had no stroller but was holding one child by the hand and carrying three others, on his back, his belly, and his shoulders. Then, finally, with no man. a woman was pushing the stroller: she was doing it with a force unseen in the men, such that Chantal, walking on the same sidewalk, had to leap out of her way at the last moment.Chantal thinks: men have daddified themselves. They aren't fathers, they're just daddies, which means: fathers without a father's authority.
Milan Kundera
The unification of the planet's history, that humanist dream which God has spitefully allowed to come true, has been accompanied by a process of dizzying reduction. True, the termites of reduction have always gnawed away at life: even the greatest love ends up as a skeleton of feeble memories. But the character of modern society hideously exacerbates this curse: it reduces man's life to its social function; the history of a people to a small set of events that are themselves reduced to a tendentious interpretation; social life is reduced to political struggle, and that in turn to the confrontation of just two great global powers.
Milan Kundera
In a society run by terror, no statements whatsoever can be taken seriously. They are all forced, and it is the duty of every honest man to ignore them.
Milan Kundera
The final option to have your book completed is to hire a ghost writer. The challenge with this option is that it is important to note that your voice IS an integral part of your branding. When you hire someone else, what your readers will ultimately get is their voice. When they see you later at your website or on your social media, your voice will not be the same. This will trigger a feeling of inconsistency when relationships need to be built upon trust and authenticity. Your audience will eventually come to think you are not the “real deal” and will find another to replace you. Finally, your book is a springboard and launching pad to greater things such as speaking, interviews, a product line, etc. Will your ghost writer be available for all of that as well? How will you be able to “ghost write” your way through an interview? Hence the reason I stress speaking in your own voice. You may think you are not perfect, but your authenticity will speak in volumes to your followers and they will be customers for life if they see your true being.
Kytka Hilmar-Jezek
Their musical ability and performance seems to derive from the past collective experience and presents itself in the individual unconscious today. Through it we tap into something eternal and it is apparent even in how they approach their playing. Perhaps we relate to it because, of any other instrument, the cello has a range that matches the human voice.
Kytka Hilmar-Jezek
In a supersonic jet, you'll land before you take off. Your watch - if it's working right - will go back. (It'll stop if it's not). You've made a journey forwards and backwards at the same time. The trip will make you younger.
Zdeněk Mahler
The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It's unintentional. It arose independent of human design, like a stalagmitic cavern. Forms which are in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with a sudden wondrous poetry.
Milan Kundera
I am a very unhappy human being and you, dearest, simply had to be summoned to create an equilibrium for all this misery.
Franz Kafka
People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as 'nauseatingly miserable beyond repair'.
Franz Kafka
He had probably been thrown out of a wine shop, and it hadn't quite dawned on him yet.
Franz Kafka
Eventually we come to know and understand a lot of things, but it's too late, because a whole life has already been determined at a stage when we didn't know a thing.
Milan Kundera
The physical contact with people who struck and trampled and killed one another seemed far worse to him than a solitary death in the purity of the waters.
Milan Kundera