Quotes About Motivation

I wrote the first book and then I forgot how to write. It used to be that I would sit and write and I would go into some other world—I could see it all. I was totally in another place. But the second it became something I had to do, something in me broke. It's like I used to know the way to some magical land and I lost the map.

Maureen Johnson

joy is one's fuel.

They don't want to write - they want the fame, money, and prestige of a writer. If they had an actual, personal desire to write, i.e., if they had something to say - without second-handedness involved, no desire to impress, nor any desire to re-hash some plagiarized ideas - they would have the talent. Men usually have the talent for that which they want to do - if they really want to do it, i.e., if their primary motive is personal, not second-hand.

Listen to what is being preached today. Look at everyone around us. You've wondered why they suffer, why they seek happiness and never find it. If any man stopped and asked himself whether he's ever held a truly personal desire, he'd find the answer. He'd see that all his wishes, his efforts, his dreams, his ambitions are motivated by other men.

Your house is made by its own needs. Those others are made by the need to impress. The determining motive of your house is in the house. The determining motive of the other is in the audience.

Why do you write if you have nothing you want to say?" "To have something to do. Something more disgusting than many other things I could do. And more amusing.

concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek.

So I want to be prepared to claim the greatest virtue of all—that I was a man who made money.

Peter, before you can do things for people, 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. The work, not the people. Your own action, not any possible object of your charity.

If any man stopped and asked himself whether he's ever held a truly personal desire, he'd find the answer. He'd see that all his wishes, his efforts, his dreams, his ambitions are motivated by other men. He's not really struggling even for material wealth, but for the second-hander's delusion—prestige. A stamp of approval, not his own.

The prospect of experiencing pleasure was not worth the effort; he had no desire to experience pleasure.

They used to rush through here, and it was wonderful to watch, it was the hurry of men who knew where they were going and were eager to get there. Now they're hurrying because they are afraid. It's not a purpose that drives them, it's fear.

what's the most depraved type of human being?" "The man without a purpose.

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.

It is not proper for man's life to be a circle, she thought, or a string of circles dropping off like zeros behind him—man's life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey down the track of a railroad, from station to station to—oh, stop it!

No matter how hard a struggle he had lived through in the past, he had never reached the ultimate ugliness of abandoning the will to act. In moments of suffering, he had never let pain win its one permanent victory: he had never allowed it to make him lose the desire for joy. He had never doubted the nature of the world or man's greatness as its motive power and its core.

Man's motive power is his moral code.

A whim is an emotion whose cause you neither know nor care to discover. Now what does it mean, to act on whim? It means that a man acts like a zombie, without any knowledge of what he deals with, what he wants to accomplish, or what motivates him. It means that a man acts in a state of temporary insanity. Is this what you call juicy or colorful? I think the only juice that can come out of such a situation is blood. To act against the facts of reality can result only in destruction.

Don't you want to live?" "Passionately." He saw the snap of a spark in Mr. Thompson's eyes and smiled. "I'll tell you more, I know that I want to live much more intensely than you do. I know that that's what you're counting on. I know that you, in fact, do not want to live at all. I want it, and because I want it so much, I will accept no substitute.

He would think of it later, he thought; one moves step by step and one must keep moving. For the moment, with an unnatural clarity, with a brutal simplification that made it almost easy, his consciousness contained nothing but one thought: It must not stop me. The sentence hung alone, with no past and no future. He did not think of what it was that must not stop him, or why this sentence was such a crucial absolute. It held him and he obeyed. He went step by step.

para qué trabajar? Sabías que tu mísera manutención básica te la darían en cualquier caso, trabajases o no..., tu "asignación para casa y comida", la llamaban..., y por encima de esa miseria podías olvidarte de conseguir algo, no importa cuánto lo intentases.

You need no proof, no reasons, no success, you need not achieve in fact the good of others—all you need to know is that your motive was the good of others, not your own. Your only definition of the good is a negation: the good is the 'non-good for me.

will, when he gets here. But, boy!—I'd work for him as a cinder sweeper. He'd blast through this valley like a rocket. He'd triple everybody's production." "Who's that?" "Hank Rearden.