Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equalled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism.
The desire not to be anything is the desire not to be.
What is man? He’s just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur.
Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. Show me the person they sleep with and I will tell you their valuation of themselves.
You don’t love causes. You don’t love everybody indiscriminately. You love only those who deserve it.
If one’s actions are honest, one does not need the predated confidence of others.
He had a big head and a face so ugly it became almost fascinating.
She knew that even pain can be confessed, but to confess happiness is to stand naked, delivered to the witness...
Never ask people about your work.
Every form of happiness if one, every desire is driven by the same motor – by our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of our own existence – and every achievement is an expression of it.
I think, therefore I’ll think.
I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.
The view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve, my life and my values could not bring me to that.
The fortune my spirit is not to be blown into coins of brass and flung to the winds as alms for the poor of the spirit. I guard my treasures: my thought, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom.
Compromise now, because you’ll have to later, anyway, only then you’ll have gone through things you’ll wish you hadn’t.
Self respect is something that can’t be killed. The worst thing is to kill a man’s pretense at it.
A spirit, too, needs fuel. It can run dry.
For the first time since her return, she felt pain, a violent pain, but it made her feel alive, because it was worth feeling.
There can be no compromise on moral principles.
To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims.