Ayn Rand Quotes

When we look up at the sky, we are trying to find the way to ourselves.

To lose one's self in reverie, one must be either very happy, or very unhappy. Reverie is the child of extremes.

I was hurrying through my own soul . . . I was leaning out . . . I was listening.

Whenever I'm out-of-doors and find myself wanting to have a first-rate think, I fling myself down on my back, throw my arms and legs out so that I look like an asterisk, and gaze at the sky.

Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses; whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings.

Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone

I was a shadow among shadows brooding over the fate of other shadows that I alone strove to summon up out of the all-pervading dusk.

Ah, what is it we send up thither, where our thoughts are either a dissonance or a sweetness and a grace?

In these silences something may rise

When it comes to such open-heart reflection, I'm a firm believer in the observer effect, which states that anything you try to observe is automatically changed by the mere fact that you're looking at it. The way I see it, if you try to study your emotions on a microscopic level, the best you can do is understand how it feels to hold the magnifying glass.

I never go anywhere or do anything that transports me outside the boundaries of my mind.

Perhaps I need some shattering experience to awaken and inspire me, or at least to give me some emotion to recollect in tranquility. But how to get it? Sit here and wait for it or go out and seek it? . . . I expect it will be sit and wait.

Perhaps it is possible to discover more in silence than in speech. Or perhaps it is only that those who are silent among us learn to listen.

Finally, Peeta turns to Pollux. "Well, then you just became our most valuable asset." Castor laughs and Pollux manages a smile. We're halfway down the first tunnel when I realize what was so remarkable about that exchange. Peeta sounded like his old self, the one who could always think of the right thing to say when nobody else could... I glance back at him as he trudges along under his guards, Gale and Jackson, his eyes fixed on the ground, his shoulders hunched forward. So dispirited. But for a moment, he was really here.

Today is a day for sober and mature reflection, not glee. Mindless celebration is both spiritually inappropriate and politically naive.

All that was neither a city, nor a church, nor a river, nor color, nor light, nor shadow: it was reverie. For a long time, I remained motionless, letting myself be penetrated gently by this unspeakable ensemble, by the serenity of the sky and the melancholy of the moment. I do not know what was going on in my mind, and I could not express it; it was one of those ineffable moments when one feels something in himself which is going to sleep and something which is awakening.

Prayer draws us near to our own souls.

O Reader! had you in your mind Such stores as silent thought can bring, O gentle Reader! you would find A tale in everything.

I did not enter into silence. Silence captured me.

Speaking uses us up, speeds us up. Without prayer, that act of confession for merely existing, one might live forever and not know it.

Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am.

It is easy to suppose that few people realize on that occasion, which comes to all of us, when we look at the blue sky for the first time, that is to say: not merely see it, but look at it and experience it and for the first time have a sense that we live in the center of a physical poetry, a geography that would be intolerable except for the non-geography that exists there - few people realize that they are looking at the world of their own thoughts and the world of their own feelings.

Silence is an answer to a wise man.

Clouds suit my mood just fine.

Amid those scenes of solitude... the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things.