188 quotes found
“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.”
“I think, therefore I'll think.”
“I take no pride in hopeless longing; I wouldn't hold a stillborn aspiration. I'd want to have it, to make it, to live it.”
“I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I r...”
“We are born into this world unarmed - our mind is our only weapon.”
“You know, I think that only if one feels immensely important can one feel truly light.”
“Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of mans values, it has to be earned.His own happiness is mans only moral purpose, but only his own virtue can ...”
“The view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve, my life and my values could not bring me to that.”
“Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade...”
“Your moral code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practiceIt demands that he starts, not with a standard of value, but wi...”
“The source of man's rights is not divine law or a congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A ___ and man is man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man's nature for his proper s...”
“She sat listening to the music. It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they se...”
“People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What Ive learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders ones reality to the person to whom one lies, making tha...”
“Why had we let it go? Why had we both been condemned...to an exile among dreary strangers who had made us give up all desire for rest, for friendship, for the sound of human voices? Could I now rec...”
“They scattered with no melody, no harmony, no rhythm to hold them. If music was emotion and emotion came from thought, then this was the scream of chaos, of the irrational, of the helpless, of mans...”
“I am older than you. Believe me, there is no other way to live on earth. Men are not open to truth or reason. They cannot be reached by a rational argument. The mind is powerless against them. Yet ...”
“Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the too...”
“Thinking is mans only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: ...”
“A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort...”
“A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False? - Right or Wrong?”
