Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

Thoughts on Love, Self and Soul

LOVE

"To say I love you one must first know how to say the 'I'." (*1)

"Love is a response to values. It is with a person's sense of life that one falls in love--with that essential sum, that fundamental stand or way of facing existence which is the essence of a personality. One falls in love with the embodiment of the values that formed a person's character which are reflected in his widest goals or smallest gestures, which create the style of his soul-- the individual style of a unique, unrepeatable, irreplaceable consciousness." (*2)

"Observe how noisily the modern intellectuals are seeking solutions for problems-and how swiftly they blank out the existence of any theory or idea, past or present, that offers the lead to a solution. Observe that these modern relativists with their credo of intellectual tolerance, of the open mind, of the anti-absolute-turn into howling dogmatists to denounce anyone who claims to possess knowledge. Observe that they tolerate anything except certainty-and approve of anything except values. Observe that they profess to love mankind, and drool with sympathy over any literary study of murderers, dipsomaniacs, drug addicts and psychotics, over any presentation of their loved object's depravity-and scream with anger when anyone dares to claim that man is not depraved. Observe that they profess to be moved by compassion for human suffering-and close their ears indignantly to any suggestion that man does not have to suffer." (*3)

SELF

"To say I love you one must first know how to say the 'I'." (*4)

Atlas Shrugged (1957) "Some of you will never know who is John Galt. But those of you who have known a single moment of love for existence and of pride in being it's worthy lover, a moment of looking at this earth and letting your glance be its sanction, have known the state of being a man..."(*5)

"What is the nature of the guilt that your teacer call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they considered perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge--he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil--he became a moral being. He was sentenced to experience the desire--he acquired the capacity for sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy--all the cardinalof his existence. It is not his vices that the myth of man's fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was--that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love--he was not a man."(*6)

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference." I was startled to learn that that statement has been adopted as a prayer by Alcoholics Anonymous, which is not exactly a philosophical organization. In view of the fact that today's social-psychological theories stress emotional, not intellectual, needs and frustrations as the cause of human suffering (e.g., the lack of "love"), that organization deserves credit for discovering that such a prayer is relevant to the problems of alcoholics." (*7)

"As a human being, you have no choices about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation- or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, undefined wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind's wings should have grown." (*8)

"Man's life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose." (*9)

"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. He cannot obtain his food without knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch-or build a cyclotron-without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think." (*10)

"Man's life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being-not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement-not survival at any price, since there is only one price that pays for man's survival: reason." (*11)

"The clearest symptom by which one can recognize this type of person (the amoralist), is his total inability to judge himself, his actions, or his work by any sort of standard. The normal pattern of self-appraisal requires a reference to some abstract value or virtue-e.g., "I am good because I am rational," "I am good because I am honest," even the second-hander's notion of "I am good because people like me." Regardless of whether the value-standards involved are true or false, these examples imply the recognition of an essential moral principle: that one's own value has to be earned." (*12)

"Reason is the faculty which perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses. Mysticism is the claim to a non-sensory means of knowledge." (*13)

SOUL(*14)

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