Quote

Love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one's own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns, and derives from love.

Ayn Rand

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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
Love
Joy
Esteem
Existence
Selfish
Happiness
Gains
Values
Loves
Earns
Another
Response
Derives
Persons
Mere
Assertion
Person
Expression
Profoundly
Self
Personal
Seeks

More quotes by Ayn Rand

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There is a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire, some hold only in their youth, and a few hold to the end of their days-the conviction that ideas matter . . . . That ideas matter means that knowledge matters, that truth matters, that one's mind matters . . .
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Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever.
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Don't rely on our knowledge of what's best for your future. We do know, but it can't be best until you know it.
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Rights are not a matter of numbers - and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.
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The ' pleasure' of being drunk is obviously the pleasure of escaping from the responsibility of Consciousness.
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To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims.
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Any work is creative work if done by a thinking mind.
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What objectivity and the study of philosophy requires is not an 'open mind,' but an active mind - a mind able and eagerly willing to examine ideas, but to examine them criticially.
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One loses everything when one loses one's sense of humor.
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It is not advisable to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener.
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People are not embracing collectivism because they have accepted bad economics. They are accepting bad economics because they have embraced collectivism.
Ayn Rand
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To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self esteem, is capable of love - because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed value. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone
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He despised causeless affection, just as he despised unearned wealth. They professed to love him for some unknown reason and they ignored all the things for which he could wish to be loved.
Ayn Rand
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Aquinas brought an Aristotelian view of reason back into European culture, and lighted the way toward the Renaissance.
Ayn Rand
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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
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It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns, and derives from love.
Ayn Rand
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Freedom comes from seeing the ignorance of your critics and discovering the emptiness of their virtue.
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The worst evil that you can do, psychologically, is to laugh at yourself. That means spitting in your own face.
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Don't think of them now. Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them. You're here. It's our time and our life, not theirs. Don't struggle not to be happy. You are. - John Gault
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Men have died in torture chambers, on the stake, in concentration camps, in front of firing squads, rather than renounce their convictions. The appeaser renounces his under the pressure of a frown on a vacant face.
Ayn Rand