Quote

Serenity comes from the ability to say “Yes” to existence. Courage comes from the ability to say “No” to the wrong choices made by others.

Ayn Rand

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ayn Rand
Age: 77 †
Born: 1905
Born: February 2
Died: 1982
Died: March 6
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Philosopher
Playwright
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
St. Petersburg
Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum
Courage
Existence
Choices
Wrong
Ability
Comes
Serenity
Others
Bravery
Made
Novelists

More quotes by Ayn Rand

Image
The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time.
Ayn Rand
Image
If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose . . . the fact that they were the people who created the phrase to make money. No other language or nation had ever used these words before. . . . Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created.
Ayn Rand
Image
There's only one passion in most artists more violent than their desire for admiration: their fear of identifying the nature of such admiration as they do receive.
Ayn Rand
Image
You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness. You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function fear is not our incentive. It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live
Ayn Rand
Image
An emotion is an automatic response, an automatic effect of man's value premises. An effect, not a cause. There is no necessary clash, no dichotomy between man's reason and his emotions
Ayn Rand
Image
You'd let the whole world perish rather than soil that immaculate self of yours with a single spot of which you'd have to be ashamed.
Ayn Rand
Image
A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue.
Ayn Rand
Image
Through the dry phases of calculations in her mind, she noticed that she did have time to feel something: it was the hard, exhilarating pleasure of action.
Ayn Rand
Image
The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind
Ayn Rand
Image
You're not sorry. You could've been here if you made the effort. But when did you ever make an effort for anybody but yourself? You're not interested in any of us or in anything we do. You think if you pay the bills, that's enough, don't you? Money! That's all you know. And all you give us is money. Have you even given us any time?
Ayn Rand
Image
When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter if I am right, he will learn if I am wrong, I will one of us will win, but both will profit.
Ayn Rand
Image
She knew that she could not have reached this white serenity except as the sum of all the colors, of all the violence she had known.
Ayn Rand
Image
Capitalism and altruism are incompatible they are philosophical opposites they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society.
Ayn Rand
Image
Do you mean to tell me that you're thinking seriously of building that way, when and if you are an architect? Yes. My dear fellow, who will let you? That's not the point. The point is, who will stop me?
Ayn Rand
Image
In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads.
Ayn Rand
Image
Face a challenge and find joy in the capacity to meet it.
Ayn Rand
Image
You love only those who deserve it.
Ayn Rand
Image
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.
Ayn Rand
Image
Ordinary human concern for human distress does not manifest itself ordinarily in the form of a gun aimed at the wallets and earnings of one's neighbors.
Ayn Rand
Image
To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims.
Ayn Rand