Whatever it was that others sought in life, their right to what they now felt was all the two of them wished to find.
I breathe for my own necessity, for the fuel of my body, for my survival... I’ve given you, not my sacrifice or my pity, but my ego and my naked need.
Architecture is not a business, not a career, but a crusade and a consecration to a joy that justifies the existence of the earth.
Man’s mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action... To remain alive, he must think.
A gracefully effortless floating, flowing and flying are the essentials of the ballet’s image of man.
One cannot hate the earth in their name. The earth is beautiful. And it is a background, but not theirs.
The theme is the evil of divorcing ideals from life.
People turned to look at Howard Roark as he passed. Some remained staring after him with sudden resentment. They could give no reason for it: it was an instinct his presence awakened in most people.
Their terror had the evasive quality of guilt: it was not the fear that comes from understanding, but from the refusal to understand.
The dance is the silent partner of music and participates in a division of labor: music presents a stylized version of man’s consciousness in action – the dance presents a stylized version of man’s body in action.
Roark spoke quietly. He was the only man in the room who felt certain of his own words.
He did not know that he was expected to attempt to buy his way into society and that they anticipated the pleasure of rejecting him. He had no time to notice their disappointment.
It’s so much easier to pass judgment on a man than on an idea.
We wish to be damned with you, rather than blessed with all our brothers. Do.
She felt that his presence seemed more intensely real when she kept her eyes away from him, almost as if the stressed awareness of herself came from him, like the sunlight from the water.
If we don’t use ugly words, we won’t have any ugliness.
Listen to what is being preached today. Look at everyone around us. You’ve wondered why they suffer, why they seek happiness and never find it. If any man stopped and asked himself whether he’s ever held a truly personal desire, he’d find the answer. He’d see that all his wishes, his efforts, his dreams, his ambitions are motivated by other men.
It was as if he were a single whole, grasped by her first glance at him, like some irreducible absolute, like an axiom not to be explained any further, as if she knew everything about him by direct perception, and what awaited her now was only the process of identifying her knowledge.
I and they, my chosen friends, my fellow-builders, shall write the firsts chapter in the new history of man.
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.