Jake Hertz

“Look, Gail." Roark got up, reached out, tore a thick branch off a tree, held it in both hands, one fist closed at each end; then, his wrists and knuckles tensed against the resistance, he bent the branch slowly into an arc. "Now I can make what I want of it: a bow, a spear, a cane, a railing. That's the meaning of life."

"Your strength?"

"Your work." He tossed the branch aside. "The material the earth offers you and what you make of it . . . ”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.”
― Woody Allen

“our national obsession with sex (and if you don’t think there is a national obsession with sex, just browse the magazine racks in the local chain bookstore) is really nothing more than a profound spiritual longing in disguise: the desire to exhaust all other desires and feel loved and sated, at peace with our fragmented modern selves, linked to those around us. At peace, at rest. I wonder, sometimes, if the same deep desire lies at the heart of addiction to drugs, to drink, to eating, to work: are we all just desperately looking for some strategy that will get us past the shoals of modern existence and safely into that imagined, calm port?”
― Roland Merullo, Breakfast with Buddha

“It's interesting to speculate on the reasons that make men so anxious to debase themselves. As in that idea of feeling small before nature. It's not a bromide, it's practically an institution. Have you noticed how self-righteous a man sounds when he tells you about it? Look, he seems to say, I'm so glad to be a pygmy, that's how virtuous I am. Have you heard with what delight people quote some great celebrity who's proclaimed that he's not so great when he looks at Niagara Falls? It's as if they were smacking their lips in sheer glee that their best is dust before the brute force of an earthquake. As if they were sprawling on all fours, rubbing their foreheads in the mud to the majesty of a hurricane. But that's not the spirit that leashed fire, steam, electricity, that crossed oceans in sailing sloops, that built airplanes and dams...and skyscrapers. What is it they fear? What is they hate so much, those who love to crawl? And why?”
― ayn rand