214 quotes found
“Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of ones values. A morality that dares to tell you ...”
“Sweep aside those hatred-eaten mystics, who pose as friends of humanity and preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value. Do they tell you that the purpose...”
“Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires...”
“Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it. Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The tas...”
“No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you can deal. It is only your own knowledge that you can claim t...”
“Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these twoexistence and consciousnessare axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of ...”
“Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will destroy it. A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard...”
“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, manevery manis an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.”
“Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man by choice; he has to...”
“Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies...It is only the concept of Life that makes the concept of 'Value possible. It is only t...”
“To think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call human nature, the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Rea...”
“A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions. Value is that which one acts to gain and keep, 'virtue is the action by whic...”
“The anti-mind is the anti-life.”
“Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automati...”
“Man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the childs education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is f...”
“Mans life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking beingnot life by means of force or fraud, but life by m...”
“There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Mans Life is its standard of value.All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is t...”
“Mans life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose . If existence on earth is your goal, you must choose your actions and values by the standard of that which is proper to manf...”
“Man has the power to act as his own destroyerand that is the way he has acted through most of his history.”
