Quotes About Meaning

Books are like that. Books just are. Sometimes books need to be, they need to exist and so they will body-snatch a writer and climb out through the writer's fingers and into the world where they belong to different people to different degrees and for different reasons.

Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants.

The most depraved type of human being ... (is) the man without a purpose.

People want nothing but mirrors around them. To reflect them while they're reflecting too ... Reflections of reflections and echoes of echoes. No beginning and no end. No center and no purpose.

Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.

I know not if this earth on which I stand is the core of the universe or if it is but a speck of dust lost in eternity. I know not and I care not. For I know what happiness is possible to me on earth. And my happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.

Look, Gail. Roark got up, reached out, tore a thick branch off a tree, held it in both hands, one fist closed at each end; then, his wrists and knuckles tensed against the resistance, he bent the branch slowly into an arc. Now I can make what I want of it: a bow, a spear, a cane, a railing. That's the meaning of life. Your strength? Your work. He tossed the branch aside. The material the earth offers you and what you make of it . . .

Fransisco, what's the most depraved type of human being? -The man without purpose.

I want to know that I've accomplished something. I want to feel that it had some meaning. At the last summing up, I want to be sure it wasn't all-for nothing.

Kira, the highest thing in man is not his god. It's that in him which knows the reverence due a god. And you, Kira, are my highest reverence...

A moment or an eternity—did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist.

When a man feels fear without reason, you call him to the attention of a psychiatrist; you are not so careful to protect the meaning, the nature and the dignity of love.

You will follow me, if we are what we are, you and I, if we live, if the world exists, if you know the meaning of this moment and can't let it slip by, as others let it slip, into the senselessness of the unwilled and unreached.

Your fear of death is not a love for life. . .

They talked about nothing in particular, sentences that had meaning only in the sound of the voices, in warm gaiety, in the ease of complete relaxation.

We cannot say what they meant, for there are no words for their meaning, but we know it without words and we knew it then.

He had just graduated from college...and he wanted to decide whether life was worth living. He did not know that this was the question in his mind. He did not think of dying. He thought only that he wished to find joy and reason and meaning in life-and that none had been offered to him anywhere.

I stand here on the summit of the mountain. I lift my head and I spread my arms. This, my body and spirit, this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.

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. The rest are no concern of mine; it is not me or The Fountainhead that they will betray: it is their own souls. AYN RAND New York, May 1968

This, my body and spirit, this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.

When I die, I hope to go to heaven-- whatever the hell that is-- and I want to be able to afford the price of admission, Virtue is the price of admission. Jim said haughtily. That's what I mean, James. So I want to be prepared to claim the greatest virtue of all-- that I was a man who made money. Any grafter can make money. James, you ought to discover some day that words have an exact meaning.

And now we look upon the earth and sky. This spread of naked rock and peaks and moonlight is like a world ready to be born, a world that waits. It seems to us it asks a sign from us, a spark, a first commandment. We cannot know what word we are to give, nor what great deed this earth expects to witness. We know it waits. It seems to say it has great gifts to lay before us. We are to speak. We are to give its goal, its highest meaning to all this glowing space of rock and sky.

The purpose of philosophy is not to help men find a meaning in life, but to prove to them that there isn't any

To me there's only one form of human depravity-the man without a purpose.