These are quotes (All Ayn Rand except for one Kurt Vonnegut and one Ralph Waldo Emerson)
that I've emailed to friends because they fit the subject we were discussing. These aren't the best quotes I've come across, but they fit the topic that was at hand. Some of my comments are attached to them because I copied and pasted the quotes but didn't check to see where they end and I begin... so, sorry. And not all of the quotes have "quotes" around them... sorry again. And they aren't very well organized... you get the picture. I'd be a horrible used car salesman :(
"Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.'"-Kurt Vonnegut (in case you begin to feel like you're "crazy" again)
Ayn Rand quotes:
*****Happiness*****
Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's
values.
Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values.
*****The Mind*****
"Rationality is the recognition of the fact that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can
take precedence over that act of perceiving it."
"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."
"The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live."
"What is a demanding pleasure that demands the use of ones mind! Not in the sense of problem solving, but in the sense of exercising discrimination, judgment, awareness."
"Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone."
"To the extent to which a man is mentally active, i.e., motivated by the desire to know, to
understand, his mind works as the programmer of his emotional computer-and his sense of life develops into a bright counterpart of a rational philosophy. To the extent a man evades, the programming of his emotional computer is done by chance influences; by random impressions, associations, imitations, by undigested snatches of environmental bromides, by cultural osmosis. If evasion or lethargy is a man's predominant method of mental functioning, the result is a sense of life dominated by fear-a soul like a shapeless piece of clay stamped by
footprints going in all directions. (In later years, such a man cries that he has lost his sense of identity; the fact is that he never acquired it.)"
*****Disallowing evil to gain the world*****
"The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours."
"The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction [that] you give it."
"The world is his, who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance, — by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow."-Emerson, not Rand
*****Sex/Love/Relationships*****
"Relationships with many men-not at the same time-is appropriate, but unlucky. Of course, if one is unlucky too often-if one makes constant mistakes-one must check one's standards.
But as a principle of romantic love, a single, lifelong romance is not the only appropriate romantic relationship. That is the ideal. If a couple achieves that, they are extremely lucky, and have good premises; one can't make that the norm. The standard of romantic love is the seriousness of the feeling and the values it is based on."-I use this one as a defense quite often. I'm not promiscuous, I'm unlucky :)
"Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another."
Francisco's Sex Speech:
[Some people] think that sex is a physical capacity which functions independently of one's mind, choice, or code of values. They think that your body creates a desire and makes a choice for you -- just about in some such way as if iron ore transformed itself into railroad rails of its own volition. Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers.
But, in fact, a man's sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself. No matter what corruption he's taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive but his own enjoyment -- just try to think of performing it as an act of selfless charity! -- an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exaltation, only in the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces him to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and to accept his real ego as his standard of value. He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to experience -- or to fake --a sense of self-esteem. The man who is proudly certain of his own value will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires,the strongest, the hardest to conquer, because only the possession of a heroine will give him the sense of an achievement,
not the possession of a brainless slut. He does not seek to gain his value, but to express it. There is no conflict between the standards of his mind and the desires of his body...Observe the ugly mess which most men make of their sex lives -- and observe the mess of contradictions which they hold as their moral philosophy. One proceeds from the other. Love is our response to our highest values, and can be nothing else.
Let a man corrupt his values and his view of existence -- let him profess that love is not self-enjoyment but self-denial, that virtue consists, not of pride but of pity or pain or weakness or sacrifice, that the noblest love is born, not of admiration but of charity, not in response to values but in response to flaws, -- and he will have cut himself in two. His body will not obey him, it will not respond, it will make him impotent toward the woman he professes to love and draw him to the lowest type of whore he can find. His body will always follow the logic of his
deepest convictions; if he believes that flaws are values, he has damned existence as evil and only the evil will attract him. He has damned himself and he will feel that depravity is all he is
worthy of enjoying... Then he will scream that his body has vicious desires of its own which his
mind cannot conquer, that sex is sin, that true love is a pure emotion of the spirit. And then he will wonder why love brings him nothing but boredom and sex nothing but shame....
Only the man who extols the purity of a love devoid of desire is capable of the depravity of a desire devoid of love.
***** Art *****
Art is a selective re-creation of reality according an artist's metaphysical value-judgments.
Art is the concretization of metaphysics. Art brings man's concepts to the perceptual level of his consciousness and allows him to grasp them directly, as if they were percepts.
This is the psycho-epistemological function of art and the reason of its importance in man's
life (and the crux of Objectivist esthetics)....Art is the indespensible medium for the communication of a moral idea.
...This does not mean that art is a substitute for philosophical thought: without a conceptual theory of ethics, an artist would not be able successfully to concretize an image of the ideal. But without the assistance of art, ethics remains in the position of theoretical engineering: art is the model-builder.
Many readers of The Fountainhead have told me that the character of Howard Roark helped them to make a decision when they faced a moral dilemma. They asked themselves: "What would Roark do in this situation?"-and, faster than their mind could identify the proper application of all the complex principles involved, the image of Roark gave them the answer. They sensed, almost instantly, what he would or would not do-and this helped them to isolate and to identify the reasons, the moral principles that would have guided him. Such is the psycho-epistemological function of a personified (concretized) human ideal.
...Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments....A certain type of confusion about the relationship between scientific discoveries and art, leads to a frequently asked question. Is photography an art? The answer is: No. It is a technical, not a creative, skill. Art requires a selective re-creation.
*****Random*****
I read this and thought of you *ahhhh* (sentimental, not screaming):"The thinking child is not antisocial (he is, in fact, the only type of child fit for social relationships). When he develops his first values and conscious convictions, particularly as he approaches adolescence, he feels as intense desire to share them with a friend who would understand him; if frustrated, he feels an acute sense of loneliness. (Loneliness is specifically the experience of this type of child-or adult; it is the experience of those who have something to offer. The emotion that drives conformists to "belong," is not loneliness, but fear- the fear of intellectual independence and responsibility. The thinking child seeks equals; the conformist seeks
protectors.)"
Then I read this and thought of me... and my future kids :):
"I will ask you to project the look on a child's face when he grasps the answer to some problem he has been striving to understand. It is a radiant look of joy, of liberation, almost of triumph, which is unself-conscious, yet self-assertive, and its radiance seems to spread in two directions: outward, as an illumination of the world-inward, as the first spark of what is to become the fire of an earned pride. If you have seen this look, or experienced it, you know that if there is such a concept as "sacred"-meaning: the best, the highest possible to man- this look is sacred, the not-to-be-betrayed, the not-to-be-sacrificed for anything or anyone."
Evasion: "Thinking is man's 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 act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one's consciousness, the refusal to think- not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment-on the
unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict "It is." Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper. By refusing to say "It is," you are refusing to say
"I am." By suspending your judgment, you are negating your person. When a man declares: "Who am I to know?" he is declaring: "Who am I to live?""
