Ayn Rand Quotes

I don't want stuff that's compromising to me as a person, but as long as it has a pathway to redemption and has meaning, there's something solid in that in terms of the way I experience it.

It's something that I had been pushing down my whole life. The search for meaning, I guess, the whispering of the soul.

Sure, I’m dramatic and sloppily semi-cynical and semi-sentimental. But, in leisure years I could grow and choose my way. Now I am living on the edge. We all are on the brink, and it takes a lot of nerve, a lot of energy, to teeter on the edge, looking over, looking down into the windy blackness and not being quite able to make out, through the yellow, stinking mist, just what lies below in the slime, in the oozing, vomit-streaked slime; and so I could go on, my thoughts, writing much, trying to find the core, the meaning for myself.

Sometimes he thinks that if he could only trace the path of his life carefully enough, everything would become clear. The ways that he screwed up would make sense. He closes his eyes tightly. His life wasn't always a mistake, he thinks, and he breathes uncertainly for awhile, trying to find a pathway into unconsciousness, into sleep.

Shedding off one more layer of skin, Keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within.

The price that has to be paid for finding truly personal life is a very high one. It is a price in terms of the acceptance of responsibility. And the awareness of responsibility inevitably leads either to despair or to confession and grace.

That which oppresses me, is it my soul trying to come out in the open, or the soul of the world knocking at my heart for entrance?

It was not the beautiful or pleasant feelings that gave me new insight, but the ones against which I fought most strongly: feelings that made me experience myself as shabby, petty, mean, helpless, humiliated, demanding, resentful or confused, and above all, sad and lonely. It was precisely through these experiences, which I had shunned for so long, that I became certain that I now understood something about my life, stemming from the core of my being, something that I could not have learned from any book.

I reached a point in my life where I didn't really like who I was.I was married to an amazing woman. I had children, and yet there was frustration.

I was just struggling with my inner vachette and pondering the depths of my own inhumanity.

And I walk out of space Into an overgrown garden of values, And tear up seeming stability And self-comprehension of causes. And your, infinity, textbook I read by myself, without people - Leafless, savage medical book, A problem book of gigantic radicals.

Learning to know anxiety is an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition either by not having known anxiety or by sinking under it. He therefore who has leaned rightly to be in anxiety has learned the most important thing.

To err is common to all mankind, but having erred he is no longer reckless nor unblest who haven fallen into evil seeks a cure, nor remains unmoved.

The second you stop questioning yourself is the second that you become the monster. -Merry

No book is a chapter, no chapter tells the whole story, no mistake defines who we are. Hope makes our lives page turners.

There's a moment for everyone when you fall into your own shadow and the fact is that it's your shadow and you're forced to live in it. And this is nothing to celebrate or not celebrate. It simply is.

To tell the truth I never had it so good. But I lacked the strength of character to bear such joy.

I wouldn't mind leaving myself behind if I could, but I don't know the way out.

I did not know that I would grow to be my mothers evil seed and do these evil deeds.

I tell myself I bear witness. The real answer is that it's obviously my programming. And I lack the constitution for suicide.

In your cocoon, occasionally you shout complaints, such as, "Leave me alone!" "Bug off!" "I want to be who I am!"... which comes from fighting against your environment... You can raise your head and just take a little peek out of the cocoon... The environment is friendly. It is called "Planet Earth.

Every second a seeker can start over, For his life's mistakes Are initial drafts And not the final version.

I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.

It is the true nature of mankind to learn from mistakes, not from example.