214 quotes found
“Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinkingthat the mind is ...”
“Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape itthat no substitute can do your thinkingthat the vilest form of self-abasem...”
“No, you do not have to live as a man; it is an act of moral choice. But you cannot live as anything elseand the alternative is that state of living death which you now see within you and around you...”
“Its not that I dont suffer, its that I know the unimportance of suffering, I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of ones soul and as a permanent scar across ...”
“She survived it. She was able to survive it, because she did not believe in suffering. She faced with astonished indignation the ugly fact of feeling pain, and refused to let it matter. Suffering w...”
“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...”
“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...”
“Do you know what she did today?" He leaned confidentially across the table, pointing at the dishes in the sink. "She went to the market and left all the breakfast dishes there and said she'd do the...”
“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: ...”
“The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.”
“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?”
“Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper. By refus...”
“To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.”
“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.”
“That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call free will is your minds freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that co...”
“Are you seeking to know what is wrong with the world? All the disasters that have wrecked your world, came from your leaders attempt to evade the fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to ...”
“Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is t...”
“Logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.”
“Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.”