Quotes from Ayn Rand

Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.

Patience is always rewarded and romance is always round the corner!

Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?

Rationalization is a process of not perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one's emotions.

Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.

It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live.

What is man? He's just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur.

Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others.

But I don't think of you. (Howard Roark)

She knew that even pain can be confessed, but to confess happiness is to stand naked, delivered to the witness...

One loses everything when one loses one's sense of humor.

Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.

Do you mean to tell me that you're thinking seriously of building that way , when and if you are an architect?" "Yes." "My dear fellow, who will let you?" "That's not the point. The point is, who will stop me?

In this world, either you're virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both, lady, not both.

Self respect is something that can't be killed. The worst thing is to kill a man's pretense at it.

Love should be treated like a business deal, but every business deal has its own terms and its own currency. And in love, the currency is virtue. You love people not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for the values, the virtues, which they have achieved in their own character.

I don't wish to be the symbol of anything. I'm only myself.

To say 'I love you' one must first know how to say the 'I.' The meaning of the 'I' is an independent, self-sufficient entity that does not exist for the sake of any other person. A person who exists only for the sake of his loved one is not an independent entity, but a spiritual parasite. The love of a parasite is worth nothing.

Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be left waiting for us in our graves-or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.

Never ask people about your work.

Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.

Love is reverence, and worship, and glory, and the upward glance. Not a bandage for dirty sores. But they don't know it. Those who speak of love most promiscuously are the ones who've never felt it. They make some sort of feeble stew out of sympathy, compassion, contempt and general indifference, and they call it love. Once you've felt what it means to love as you and I know it - total passion for the total height - you're incapable of anything less.

I take no pride in hopeless longing; I wouldn't hold a stillborn aspiration. I'd want to have it, to make it, to live it.

Well, I always know what I want. And when you know what you want--you go toward it. Sometimes you go very fast, and sometimes only an inch a year. Perhaps you feel happier when you go fast. I don't know. I've forgotten the difference long ago, because it really doesn't matter, so long as you move.