CJ Hall > CJ's Quotes

“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“A cosmic perspective always attenuates tragedy. If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel Of Obsession

“More in love with desire than with the desired!”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel Of Obsession

“eternal recurrence means that every time you choose an action you must be willing to choose it for all eternity. And it is the same for every action not made, every stillborn thought, every choice avoided. And all unlived life will remain bulging inside you, unlived through all eternity. And the unheeded voice of your conscience will cry out to you forever.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel Of Obsession

“I must stop him from being one of those who call themselves good because they have no claws.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept

“Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept

“It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one's germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept

“I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept

“If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept

“Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you'll always find despair.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept

“I should have become an "I" before I became a "we".”
― Irvin Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept

“One thing I feel clear about is that it's important not to let your life live you. Otherwise, you end up at forty feeling you haven't really lived. What have I learned? Perhaps to live now, so that at fifty I won't look back upon my forties with regret.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept

“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that's much harder?”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“I regret nothing. There have been things I missed, but I ask no questions, because I have loved it, such as it has been, even the moments of emptiness, even the unanswered-and that I loved it, that is the unanswered in my life.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. man had no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons,and to make weapons - a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and we have comes from a single attribute of man -the function of his reasoning mind.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“One loses everything when one loses one's sense of humor.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Never ask people about your work.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched".”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Worry is a waste of emotional reserve".”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Thousands of years ago the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burnt at the stake he'd taught his brothers to light, but he left them a gift they had not conceived and he lifted darkness from the face of the Earth.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Degrees of ability vary, but the basic principle remains the same: the degree of a man's independence, initiative and personal love for his work determines his talent as a worker and his worth as a man. Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself; not what he has or hasn't done for others. There is no substitute for personal dignity. There is no standard of personal dignity except independence.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Now I don’t see anything evil in a desire to make money. But money is only a means to some end. If a man wants it for a personal purpose — to invest in his industry, to create, to study, to travel, to enjoy luxury — he’s completely moral. But the men who place money first go much beyond that. Personal luxury is a limited endeavor. What they want is ostentation: to show, to stun, to entertain, to impress others… At the price of their own self-respect. In the realm of greatest importance — the realm of values, of judgment, of spirit, of thought — they place others above self, in the exact manner which altruism demands. A truly selfish man cannot be affected by the approval of others. He doesn’t need it.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. The work, not the people. Your own action, not any possible object of your charity.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“I want to know that I've accomplished something. I want to feel that it had some meaning. At the last summing up, I want to be sure it wasn't all-for nothing.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“The mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. It is a secondary consequence. The primary act—the process of reason—must be performed by each man alone.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“If you can’t let go of the past, the mistakes you’ve made will eat you alive.”
― Stephen King, The Outsider

“Reality is thin ice, but most people skate on it their whole lives and never fall through until the very end. We did fall through, but we helped each other out. We’re still helping each other.”
― Stephen King, The Outsider