“Art is man’s metaphysical mirror; what a rational man seeks to see in that mirror is a salute; what an irrational man seeks to see is a justification – even if only a justification of his depravity, as a last convulsion of his betrayed self-esteem.”
Source: The Romantic Manifesto (1969), Chapter 3 ("Art and Sense of Life")
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Ayn Rand 322
Russian-American novelist and philosopher 1905–1982Related quotes

Source: Solaris (1961), Ch. 6: "The Little Apocrypha", p. 72
Context: We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are seaching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilisation superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don't like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us — that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence — then we don't like it any more.

blood and sex
This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“What the superior man seeks is in himself; what the small man seeks is in others.”

“There is certainly no truth in the popular belief, that a man's will is the mirror of his character.”
Falsum est nimirum quod creditur vulgo, testamenta hominum speculum esse morum.
Letter 18, 1.
Letters, Book VIII
“Man at his best is a system-breaker, an iconoclast seeking not only variety, but destruction.”
Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 152