Quotes About Fulfillment

joy is one's fuel.

I've chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it then I'm only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standardsand I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may perhaps stand at the beginning of one

Paradoxically, it is the so-called pleasure-chasers—the men who seemingly live for nothing but the sensation of the moment, who are concerned only with having a good time—who are psychologically incapable of enjoying pleasure as an end in itself. The neurotic pleasure-chaser imagines that, by going through the motions of celebration, he will be able to make himself feel that he has something to celebrate.

Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

Most people build as they live—as a matter of routine and senseless accident. But a few understand that building is a great symbol. We live in our minds, and existence is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality, to state it in gesture and form. For the man who understands this, a house he owns is a statement of his life. If he doesn't build, when he has the means, it's because his life has not been what he wanted.

Architecture is not a business, not a career, but a crusade and a consecration to a joy that justifies the existence of the earth.

there's nothing of any importance in life—except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value.

He lost, for that moment, all the days and dogmas of his past; his concepts, his problems, his pain were wiped out; he knew only—as from a great, clear distance—that man exists for the achievement of his desires, and he wondered why he stood here, he wondered who had the right to demand that he waste a single irreplaceable hour of his life, when his only desire was to seize the slender figure in gray and hold her through the length of whatever time there was left for him to exist.

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... 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 . . .

their love of existence—chosen in the knowledge that nothing will be given, that one must make one's own desire and every shape of its fulfillment—through the steps of shaping metal, rails and motors—they had moved by the power of the thought that one remakes the earth for one's enjoyment, that man's spirit gives meaning to insentient matter by molding it to serve one's chosen goal.

When a man drowns himself in work, it's because he's trying to escape from something. You ought to have a hobby.

She tried to demonstrate her power over him. She stayed away from his house; she waited for him to come to her. He spoiled it by coming too soon; by refusing her the satisfaction of knowing that he waited and struggled against his desire; by surrendering at once.

What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can't stand still. It must grow or perish.

You will not enter it until you learn that you do not need to convince or to conquer the world. When you learn it, you will see that through all the years of your struggle, nothing had barred you from Atlantis and there were no chains to hold you, except the chains you were willing to wear. Through all those years, that which you most wished to win was waiting for you...waiting as unremittingly as you were fighting, as passionately, as desperately—but with a greater certainty than yours.

Man's life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose . If existence on earth is your goal, you must choose your actions and values by the standard of that which is proper to man—for the purpose of preserving, fulfilling and enjoying the irreplaceable value which is your life.

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!

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 . . .

Whatever it was that others sought in life, their right to what they now felt was all the two of them wished to find.

Acepta el hecho de que lograr tu felicidad es el único objetivo moral de tu vida, y que la felicidad..., no el dolor ni las extravagancias irresponsables, es la prueba de tu integridad moral, ya que es la prueba y el resultado de tu lealtad al logro de tus valores.

My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose." Book-

Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach.

I have, let's say, sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I've chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I'm only condemning myself to sixty years of torture.

La felicidad es un estado de alegría no contradictoria, una alegría sin pena ni culpa, una alegría que no choca con ninguno de tus valores y que no te lleva a tu propia destrucción; no es la alegría de escapar de tu mente, sino la de usar su poder total; no es la alegría de disimular la realidad, sino la de alcanzar valores reales; no es la alegría de un borracho, sino la de un productor.

conformarse con un trabajo que requiere menos que la plena capacidad de tu mente es apagar tu motor y sentenciarte a la decadencia; de que nuestro trabajo es el proceso de alcanzar nuestros valores, y de que perder nuestra ambición por los valores es perder nuestra ambición de vivir; de que nuestro cuerpo es una máquina, pero nuestra mente es su conductor, y se debe conducir tan lejos como nos lleve nuestra mente