Quote from Ayn Rand:
Peter Keating: "Do you always have to have a purpose? Do you always have to be so damn serious? Can't you ever do things without reason, just like everybody else? You're so serious, so old. Everything's important with you. Everything's great, significant in some way, every minute, even when you keep still. Can't you ever be comfortable--and unimportant?" | Howard Roark: "No."
Simimal Quotes:
Ayn Rand
Anything may be betrayed, anyone may be forgiven, but not those who lack the courage of their own greatness.
Ayn Rand
She knew she could not have reached this white serenity except as the sum of all the colors, of all the violence she had known.
Ayn Rand
To say 'I love you' one must know first how to say the 'I.'
Ayn Rand
You know what you are actually in love with? Integrity. The impossible. The clean, consistent, reasonable, self-faithful, the all-of-one-style, like a work of art.
Ayn Rand
You must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences.
Ayn Rand
It does not matter that only a few in each generation will grasp and achieve the full reality of man's proper stature—and the rest will betray it. It is those few that move the world and give life its meaning—and it is those few that I have always sought to address. The rest are no concern of mine; it is not me or "The Fountainhead" that they will betray: it is their own souls.
Ayn Rand
About Mike the construction worker, friend of Roark: "He worshipped expertness of any kind. He loved his work passionately and had no tolerance for anything save for other single-track devotions. He was a master in his own filed and felt no sympathy except for mastery. His view of the world was simple: there were the able and there were the incompetent; he was not concerned with the latter.
Ayn Rand
The secrets of this earth are not for all men to see, but only for those who will seek them.
Ayn Rand
I would step in the way of a bullet if it were aimed at my husband. It is not self-sacrifice to die protecting that which you value: If the value is great enough, you do not care to exist without it.
Ayn Rand
[Roark to Keating:] If you want my advice, Peter," he said at last, "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?"
Ayn Rand
Why do they always teach us that it is easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves. It's the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage.