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Wisdom Quotes
"Hardly any human being is capable of pursuing two professions or two arts rightly."
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"When I am getting ready to reason with a man, I spend one-third of my time thinking about myself and what I am going to say and two-thirds about him and what he is going to say."
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"The inartistic methods that we use to blunt anxiety and unartful expedients that we resort to in order to escape pain and numb banality reveals what we dread most, the act of suffering from a mortal loss or the debasement that we earn by wallowing in our decadent acts of escapism."
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"Associate Yourself with People Who Think Positively: Associate yourself with people who think positively. You cannot surround yourself with negative people and expect positive outcomes."
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"There was still one response, the greatest, that she had missed. She thought: To find a feeling that would hold, as their sum, as their final expression, the purpose of all the things she loved on earth... To find a consciousness like her own, who would be the meaning of her world, as she would be of his... No, not Francisco d'Anconia, not Hank Rearden, not any man she had ever met or admired... A man who existed only in her knowledge of her capacity for an emotion she had never felt, but would have given her life to experience."
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"Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority. Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience-that your mind is fallible, but becoming mindless will not make you infallible-that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error."
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"It is one thing to be clever and another to be wise."
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"Forgive but do not forget, or you will be hurt again. Forgiving changes the perspectives. Forgetting loses the lesson."
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"Every great man is an idol, an oracle of inquiry. Don't aspire to know the former, but aspire to know the diety in his soul."
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"You cannot build character and courage by taking away a man's initiative and independence."
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"Those old sayings about Give It Time, and Time is a Healer depend on just whose time it is."
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"Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered."
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"I never miss a good chance to shut up."
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"In every bit of honest writing in the world, there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love."
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"Let the improvement of yourself keep you so busy that you have no time to criticize others."
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"To understand is to forgive."
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"That was my first instinct -- to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was a greater need to protect myself. Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm."
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"Everything depends on the right perspective."
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"Availability of knowledge is only next to prevalence of stupidity in its overwhelming abundance."
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"There were always men who looked beyond the dimensions of their own society- and while they may have been called fools or criminals in their time they are the roster of great men as far as the record of human history is concerned- and visualized something which can be called universally human and which is not identical with what a particular society assumes human nature to be. There were always men who were bold and imaginative enough to see beyond the frontiers of their own existence."
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"There is no method but to be very intelligent."
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"We only consult the ear because the heart is wanting."
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"People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered themselves than by those found by others."
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"Concupiscence and force are the source of all our actions; concupiscence causes voluntary actions, force involuntary ones."
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"Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth."
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"Different men seek after happiness in different ways and by different means, and so make for themselves different modes of life and forms of government."
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"Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new at all."
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"The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines."
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"A loss may be sometimes a gain."
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"I don't trust people who don't love themselves and tell me, 'I love you.' ... There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt."
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"The sensitivity of men to small matters, and their indifference to great ones, indicates a strange inversion."
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"A long time ago someone told me that a story will tell itself, when it's ready."
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