Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

"And, after all, you’ve got to live.”“Not that way,” said Roark."

"Happiness is self-contained and self-sufficient. Happy men have no time and no use for you. Happy men are free men."

"Keating felt naked... People were his protection against people. Roark had no sense of people. Others gave Keating a feeling of his own value. Roark gave him nothing."

"From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man—the function of his reasoning mind."

"A desire to choose the hardest might be a confession of weakness in itself."

"When the name of Gail Wynand became a threat in the publishing world, a group of newspaper owners took him aside-at a city charity affair which all had to attend-and reproached him for what they called hid debasement of the public taste."It is not my function" said Wynand, "to help people preserve a self-respect they haven't got. You give them what they profess to like in public, I give them what they really like. Honesty is the best policy, gentlemen, though not quite in the sense you were taught to belive"."

"You’re so beautiful, Dominique. Its such a lovely accident on God’s part that there’s one person who matches inside and out."

"There is noroom for the love of others within the tight, crowded miser’s hole of a privateego. Be empty in order to be filled. ’He that loveth his life shall lose it; andhe that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal."

"Don’t you know that most people take most things because that’s what’s given them, and they have no opinion whatever? Do you wish to be guided by what they expect you to think they think or by your own judgment?"

"To say "I love you" one must know first how to say the "I"."

"There’s nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we’re not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge."

"He had always wanted to write music, and he could give no other identity to the thing he sought. If you want to know what it is, he told himself, listen to the first phrases of Tchaikovsky's First Concerto - or the last movement of Rachmaninoff's Second. Men have not found the words for it nor the deed nor the thought, but they have found the music. Let me see the answer to the promise of that music. Let me see it made real. Let me see the answer to the promise of that music. Not servants nor those served; not altars and immolations; but the final, the fulfilled, innocent of pain. Don't help me or serve me, but let me see it once, because I need it. Don't work for my happiness, my brothers --- show me yours --- show me that it is possible --- show me your achievements --- and the knowledge will give me courage for mine."

"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?"

"And she thought, with a vicious thrill, of what these people would do if they read her mind in this moment; if they knew that she was thinking of a man in a quarry, thinking of his body with a sharp intimacy as one does not think of another’s body but only of one’s own. She smiled; the cold purity of her face prevented them from seeing the nature of that smile."

"I want to sleep with you. Now, tonight, and at any time you may care to call me. I want your naked body, your skin. your mouth, your hands...—I want you like an animal...or a whore."

"I want to sleep with you. Now, tonight, and at any time you may care to call me. I want your naked body, your skin. your mouth, your hands... I want you like an animal...or a whore."

"When they lay in bed together it was—as it had to be, as the nature of the act demanded—an act of violence. It was surrender, made the more complete by the force of their resistance. It was an act of tension, as the great things on earth are things of tension. It was tense as electricity, the force fed on resistance, rushing through wires of metal stretched tight; it was tense as water made into power by the restraining violence of a dam. The touch of his skin against hers was not a caress, but a wave of pain, it became pain by being wanted too much, by releasing in fulfillment all the past hours of desire and denial."

"The faces stood out, separate, lonely, no two alike. Behind each, there were the years of a life lived or half over, effort, hope and an attempt, honest or dishonest, but an attempt. It had left on all a single mark in common: on lips smiling with malice, on lips loose with renunciation, on lips tight with uncertain dignity—on all—the mark of suffering."

"..it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed. It is the unsacrificed self that we must respect in man above all."

"A man’s spirit is his self. That entity which is his consciousness. To think, to feel, to judge, to act are functions of the ego."