Quotes About Achievement

I know what I want up to the age of two hundred. Know what you want in life and go after it. I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals, and I loathe humanity, for its failure to live up to these possibilities.

They're all aristocrats, that's true," said Wyatt, "because they know that there's no such thing as a lousy job—only lousy men who don't care to do it.

Aren't you training a man who could become your most dangerous competitor?" "That's the only sort of men I like to hire. Dagny, have you lived too long among the looters? Have you come to think that one man's ability is a threat to another?" "Oh no! But I thought I was almost the only one left who didn't think that.

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 standards—and 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.

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.

All the giants of the spirit whom I've broken. I don't think anybody ever realized how much I enjoyed doing it. It's a kind of lust. I'm perfectly indifferent to slugs like Ellsworth Toohey or my friend Alvah, and quite willing to leave them in peace. But just let me see a man of a slightly higher dimension—and I've got to make a sort of Toohey out of him. I've got to. It's like a sex urge.

One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one's way to get the best for oneself.

No," said Toohey. "You ask what he'd do if he couldn't be an architect." "He'd walk over corpses. Any and all of them. All of us. But he'd be an architect.

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, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being—not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement—not survival at any price, since there's only one price that pays for man's survival: reason.

Your ego is your strictest judge. They run from it. They spend their lives running. It's easier to donate a few thousands to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement. It's simple to seek substitutes for competence—such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence.

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

Pero, desde luego, inversión es un vocablo de significado relativo. Depende de lo que se quiera conseguir.

You are so lost to your higher self that you would resent me for my achievements, rather than celebrate them with me, sexually?

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!

Howard, everything you've done in your life is wrong according to the stated ideals of mankind. And here you are. And somehow it seems a huge joke on the whole world.

He asked simply, as if the matter of her presence were not unusual at all: "Did you have a hard time climbing those stairs?" She answered, "A little. All climbing is hard. But it's usually worth it.

You'll get everything society can give a man. You'll keep all the money. You'll take any fame or honor anyone might want to grant. You'll accept such gratitude as the tenants might feel. And I--I'll take what nobody can give a man, except himself. I will have built Cortlandt.

It does not matter that only a few in each generation will grasp and achieve the full reality of man's proper stature—and that the rest will betray it. It is those few that move the world and give life its meaning—and it is those few that I have always sought to address.

They remained silent, letting the room be filled by the sounds which centuries of men and of struggle had established as the symbol of joyous attainment: the blast of the cork, the laughing tinkle of a pale gold liquid running into two broad cups filled with the weaving reflections of candles, the whisper of bubbles rising through two crystal stems, almost demanding that everything in sight rise, too, in the same aspiration.

la conciencia de haber ganado un lugar en un mundo al que respetaba, y obtenido el reconocimiento de personas a quienes admiraba.

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.

Here, we trade achievements, not failures—values, not needs. We're free of one another, yet we all grow together.

of any achievements open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own character—that