"Either we have hope or we don't; it's a dimension of the soul. It's an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. [It is] the ability to work for something because it is good, not because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is. Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense.

What faith means to me is simply this: it is a particular state of mind, a state of persistent and productive openness... Everything meaningful in life, though it may assume the most dramatic form of questioning and doubting, is distinguished by a certain transcendence of individual human existence—beyond the limits of mere 'self-care'—toward other people, toward society, toward the world. Only by looking outward, by caring for things that, in terms of pure survival, one needn't bother with at all... [only] by throwing oneself over and over again into the tumult of the world, with the intention of making one's voice count— only thus does one really become a person, a creator of the 'order of the spirit,' a being capable of a miracle: the recreation of the world."

Vaclav Havel