Quotes from Ayn Rand

If you want my advice, Peter, you've made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work. Don't you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?

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.

The secrets of this earth are not for all men to see, but only for those who will seek them.

You're so beautiful, Dominique. Its such a lovely accident on God's part that there's one person who matches inside and out.

Life is achievement....Give yourself an aim, something you want to do, then go after it, breaking through everything, with nothing in mind but your aim, all will, all concentration, and get it.

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

But this was that view of human destiny which she had most passionately hated and rejected: 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. Her life and her values could not bring her to that, she thought; she had never found beauty in longing for the impossible and had never found the possible to be beyond her reach.

A truly selfish man cannot be affected by the approval of others. He doesn't need it.

It is a sin to write this. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. It is base and evil. It is as if we were speaking alone to no ears but our own. And we know well that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone. We have broken the laws. The laws say that men may not write unless the Council of Vocations bid them so. May we be forgiven!

Do not let the hero in your soul perish...

That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call 'free will' is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.

and he said her name to fill the space of five years.