Martin Svoboda

“The real lessons of life are learned by recognizing and coming to terms with being human. It is how we stand up to failure and duress which really marks our progress in life. Sometimes one of the most important lessons is to learn to just let go of the past.”

“Tell your friend that in his death, a part of you dies and goes with him. Wherever he goes, you also go. He will not be alone.”

“The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.”

“You must understand the whole of life,
not just one little part of it.
that is why you must read,
that is why you must look at the skies,
that is why you must sing and dance,
and write poems and suffer and understand,
for all that is life.”

“The moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it, you will discover that for you the world is transformed.”

“The more you know yourself, the more clarity there is. Self-knowledge has no end – you don’t come to an achievement; you don’t come to a conclusion. It is an endless river.”

“If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem.”

“One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.”

“Happiness is strange; it comes when you are not seeking it. When you are not making an effort to be happy, then unexpectedly, mysteriously, happiness is there, born of purity, of a loveliness of being.”

“Thought is so cunning, so clever, that it distorts everything for its own convenience.”

“Governments want efficient technicians, not human beings, because human beings become dangerous to governments – and to organized religions as well. That is why governments and religious organizations seek to control education.”

“If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.”

“Normality is a way to nowhere. A normal company will go bankrupt.”

“Don't let things you can't do stop you from doing things you can.”

“You try to do the best with what you've got and ignore everything else. That's why horses get blinders in horse racing: You look at the horse next to you, and you lose a step.”

“Okay, firstly, academic historians write academic history for academics. It's a myth that you can't be a historian without having a degree. Ian Fletcher, the globally acknowledged expert in the Peninsular War, doesn't have a degree. He always tells me that, “The books we write are the ones which academics read to get their degrees from.””

“Read history. That’s it. Read history. Read and read and read in both primary and secondary sources. Learn to evaluate and compare. And then… write. Writing will be the hardest thing you ever do. But it’s the goal— write about the past and how we see it.”

“I Love my friends neither with my heart nor with my mind. Just in case… Heart might stop. Mind can forget. I Love them with my Soul. Soul never stops or forgets.”

“Be like a tree and let the dead leaves drop.”