Ayn Rand Quotes

There is no affirmation without the one who affirms. in this sense, everything to which you grant your love is yours

I will not die, it's the world that will end." paraphrase of unknown philosopher

No happy person can be quite so impervious to pain (Gail Wynand to Dominique Francon)

She did not know what it was about him that had always made her want to see him broken.

There is only one source of authentic self-confidence: reason.

The attack on "selfishness" is an attack on man's self-esteem; to surrender one, is to surrender the other.

The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual; everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort.

There are two side to every issue.

Allies never trust each other, but that doesn't spoil their effectiveness.

I agree that [marriage] should be treated like a business deal. But every business deal has to have its own terms and its own kind of currency.

I have no faith at all. I only hold convictions.

When you are in love, it means that the person you love is of great personal, selfish importance to you and to your life.

I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you.

He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see.

Who is John Galt?

Man is an end in himself.

If that which we have found is the corruption of solitude, then what can men wish for save corruption? If this is the great evil of being alone, than what is good and what is evil?

The truth is not for all men but only for those who seek it.

The man who discovers new knowledge is the permanent benefactor of humanity.

We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.

Fear walks through the City, fear without name, without shape. All men feel it and none dare to speak.

...man's life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey...

A house can have integrity, just like a person, ' said Roark, 'and just as seldom.

When the law no longer protects you from the corrupt, but protects the corrupt from you – you know your nation is doomed.

Keating stood still, because he understood for the first time what it was that artists spoke about when they spoke of beauty.

Beauty is a sense of harmony.

My real soul...? It’s real only when it’s independent...

It was the smile of a man who is able to see, to know and to create the glory of existence. It was the mocking, challenging smile of a brilliant intelligence.

I’m not capable of suffering completely. I never have. It goes only down to a certain point and then it stops. As long as there is that untouched point, it’s not really pain.

She found a dark satisfaction in pain—because that pain came from him.

This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero.

Logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.

To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes.

By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man—every man—is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.

The anti-mind is the anti-life.

Man has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

Reason is your means of survival — so that for you, who are a human being, the question ‘to be or not to be’ is the question 'to think or not to think..'.

Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

The source of work? Man’s mind...man’s reasoning mind.

...they want us to pretend that we see the world as they pretend they see it. They need some sort of sanction from us.

Men hate passion, any great passion. Henry Cameron made a mistake : he loved his work. That was why he fought. That was why he lost.

I love doing it. Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable.

Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment’s torture.

The statue was of a young man with a tall, gaunt body and an angular face. He held his head as if he faced a challenge and found joy in his capacity to meet it.

One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one’s own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns and derives from love.

He did not know that he was expected to attempt to buy his way into society and that they anticipated the pleasure of rejecting him. He had no time to notice their disappointment.

...there can be no justification for a society in which a man is expected to manufacture the weapons for his own murderers.

A cardinal principle of good fiction [is]: the theme and the plot of a novel must be integrated—as thoroughly integrated as mind and body or thought and action in a rational view of man.

In art, and in literature, the end and the means, or the subject and the style, must be worthy of each other.That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth re-creating in art.

A good novel is an indivisible sum: every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization.