Ryan Farrow > Ryan's Quotes

“Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.”
― Herman Hesse

“To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”
― Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry

“Sometimes, you have to step outside of the person you've been and remember the person you were meant to be. The person you want to be. The person you are.”
― H.G. Wells

“But it's a poor fellow who can't take his pleasure without asking other people's permission.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”
― Aristotle

“Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.”
― Epicurus

“This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“If the ignorance of nature gave birth to such a variety of gods, the knowledge of this nature is calculated to destroy them.”
― Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach, System of Nature

“The man who entered was a stranger. He was young, tall, and something about him suggested violence, though she could not say what it was, because the first trait one grasped about him was a quality of self-control that seemed almost arrogant.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“In general we are reminded that the word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight. Unheimlich is customarily used, we are told, as the contrary only of the first signification of heimlich, and not of the second. [...] On the other hand, we notice that Schelling says something which throws quite a new light on the concept of the Unheimlich, for which we were certainly not prepared. According to him, everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny

“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”
― Ayn Rand

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. ”
― Archimedes

“It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.”
― Epicurus

“Man cannot cherish his existence any longer than life holds out charms to him: when he is wrought upon by painful sensations, or drawn by contrary impulsions, his natural tendency is deranged; he is under the necessity to follow a new route; this conducts him to his end, which it even displays to him as the most desirable good.”
― Baron d'Holbach

“[Dean] “My dear fellow, who will let you?”

[Roark] “That’s not the point. The point is, who will stop me?”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

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

“The man who waits for reality to write the truth inside his soul waits in vain.”
― Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand

“What is common in all these dreams is obvious. They completely satisfy wishes excited during the day which remain unrealized. They are simply and undisguisedly realizations of wishes.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams

“Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“How do we keep our inner fire alive? Two things, at minimum, are needed: an ability to appreciate the positives in our life – and a commitment to action. Every day, it's important to ask and answer these questions: ‘What's good in my life?’ and ‘What needs to be done?”
― Nathaniel Branden

“A friend to all is a friend to none.”
― Aristotle

“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind. Nor hath love's mind of any judgment taste; Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste: And therefore is love said to be a child, Because in choice he is so oft beguil'd.”
― William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.”
― George Gordon Byron (Lord Byron)

“Why do they call me misanthrope? Because They hate me, not I them.”
― George Gordon Byron, Don Juan

“You speak an infinite deal of nothing.”
― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

“If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instructions: I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching.”
― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

“Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self.”
― Max Stirner

“If i cherish you because I hold you dear, because in you my heart finds nourishment, my need satisfaction, then it is not done for the sake of a higher essence whose hallowed body you are, not on account of my beholding in you a ghost, an appearing spirit, but from egoistic pleasure; you yourself with *your* essence are valuable to me.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own