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Hence the sterile, uninspiring futility of a great many theoretical discussions of ethics, and the resentment which many people feel towards such discussions: moral principles remain in their minds as floating abstractions, offering them a goal they cannot grasp and demanding that they reshape their souls in its image, thus leaving them with a burden of undefinable moral guilt.Ayn Rand
2
The dance is the silent partner of music and participates in a division of labor: music presents a stylized version of man’s consciousness in action–the dance presents a stylized version of man’s body in action.Ayn Rand
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The writer who develops a beautiful style, but has nothing to say, represents a kind of arrested esthetic development; he is like a pianist who acquires a brilliant technique by playing finger-exercises, but never gives a concert.Ayn Rand
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A cardinal principle of good fiction [is]: the theme and the plot of a novel must be integrated–as thoroughly integrated as mind and body or thought and action in a rational view of man.Ayn Rand
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In art, and in literature, the end and the means, or the subject and the style, must be worthy of each other. That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth re-creating in art.Ayn Rand
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There are two aspects of man’s existence which are the special province and expression of his sense of life: love and art. I am referring here to romantic love, in the serious meaning of that term–as distinguished from the superficial infatuations of those whose sense of life is devoid of any consistent values, i.e., of any lasting emotions other than fear. 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. It is one’s own sense of life that acts as the selector, and responds to what it recognizes as one’s own basic values in the person of another. It is not a matter of professed convictions (though these are not irrelevant); it is a matter of much more profound, conscious and subconscious harmony. Many errors and tragic disillusionments are possible in this process of emotional recognition, since a sense of life, by itself, is not a reliable cognitive guide. And if there are degrees of evil, then one of the most evil consequences of mysticism–in terms of human suffering–is the belief that love is a matter of “the heart, ” not the mind, that love is an emotion independent of reason, that love is blind and impervious to the power of philosophy. Love is the expression of philosophy–of a subconscious philosophical sum–and, perhaps, no other aspect of human existence needs the conscious power of philosophy quite so desperately. When that power is called upon to verify and support an emotional appraisal, when love is a conscious integration of reason and emotion, of mind and values, then–and only then–it is the greatest reward of man’s life.Ayn Rand
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The pursuit of truth is not important. The pursuit of that truth is important which helps you in reaching your goal that is provided you have one.Ayn Rand
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It [ballet] is a perfect medium for the expression of spiritual love.Ayn Rand
9
A gracefully effortless floating, flowing and flying are the essentials of the ballet’s image of man.Ayn Rand