Karel Čapek

Born 1890 · Died 1938

From Malé Svatoňovice, Lands of the Bohemian Crown, Czech Republic · Nationality: Czechoslovakia, Cisleithania

Czech writer

Quotes

“You still stand watch, O human star, burning without a flicker, perfect flame, bright and resourceful spirit. Each of your rays a great idea — O torch which passes from hand to hand, from age to age, world without end.”
R.U.R.
“They learn to speak, write, and do arithmetic. They have a phenomenal memory. If one read them the Encyclopedia Britannica they could repeat everything back in order, but they never think up anything original. They'd make fine university professors.”
R.U.R.
“The Continent is noisier, less disciplined, dirtier, more rabid, craftier, more passionate, more convivial, more amorous, hedonistic, vivacious, coarse, garrulous, unruly and somehow less perfect. Please, give me a ticket straight to the Continent.”
Letters from England
“The only perfection which modern civilisation achieves is mechanical; machines are magnificent and immaculate but the life which serves them or is served by them isn't magnificent or shiny or more perfect or more comely.”
Letters from England
“I have seen greatness and power, wealth, prosperity and incomparable development. I was never sad that we are a small and unfinished part of the world. To be small, unsettled and uncompleted is a good and courageous mission.”
Letters from England

Quotes from Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Books by Karel Čapek in order

Books by Karel Čapek in the order they were published, from R. U. R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) A Fantastic Melodrama in Three Acts and an Epilogue (1920) to Capek Four Plays (2014).

If you like Karel Čapek

Authors readers of Karel Čapek often like, from our AI-written notes

Franz KafkaLike Čapek, he wrote in Prague in the interwar period and turned bureaucratic and institutional pressures into strange, precise fiction.
Jaroslav HašekA Czech contemporary whose satire of the army and state in The Good Soldier Švejk shares Čapek's comic view of authority.
Yevgeny ZamyatinHis novel We is an early dystopia about a rational state and its citizens, a close match to Čapek's concerns with technology and control.
Aldous HuxleyHis Brave New World takes up similar questions about science, industry and social conformity, in a more openly ironic voice.
George OrwellHis political satire and warnings about propaganda and totalitarian power connect with the themes in Power and Glory and War with the Newts.
Stanisław LemHis science fiction uses scientific premises to raise moral and philosophical questions, as Čapek does in R.U.R. and The Absolute at Large.