Source: The Autobiography, P. 34
“He who cannot forgive breaks the bridge over which he himself must pass.”
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers, P. 86.
The Fantastic Imagination (1893)
Context: If there be music in my reader, I would gladly wake it. Let fairytale of mine go for a firefly that now flashes, now is dark, but may flash again. Caught in a hand which does not love its kind, it will turn to an insignificant, ugly thing, that can neither flash nor fly.
The best way with music, I imagine, is not to bring the forces of our intellect to bear upon it, but to be still and let it work on that part of us for whose it exists. We spoil countless precious things by intellectual greed. He who will be a man, and will not be a child, must — he cannot help himself — become a little man, that is, a dwarf. He will, however, need no consolation, for he is sure to think himself a very large creature indeed.
If any strain of my "broken music" make a child's eyes flash, or his mother's grow for a moment dim, my labour will not have been in vain.
The Ayn Rand Column ‘Introducing Objectivism’
Characterizations of Existentialism (1944)
“Forgiveness: Once a woman has forgiven her man, she must not reheat his sins for breakfast.”
Marlene Dietrich's ABC https://books.google.com/books?id=u7x5UYHMs0IC&printsec=frontcover&dq=intitle:Marlene+intitle:Dietrich%27s+intitle:abc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjv7qiV8cPfAhWinuAKHcZLAWQQ6AEIKjAA#v=snippet&q=forgiveness&f=false (1962)
“Man is the animal that draws lines which he himself then stumbles over.”
As quoted in Scandinavian Review (2003), by the American-Scandinavian Foundation, p. 18
Context: Man is the animal that draws lines which he himself then stumbles over. In the whole pattern of civilization there have been two tendencies, one toward straight lines and rectangular patterns and one toward circular lines. There are reasons, mechanical and psychological, for both tendencies. Things made with straight lines fit well together and save space. And we can move easily — physically or mentally — around things made with round lines. But we are in a straitjacket, having to accept one or the other, when often some intermediate form would be better.
“That man that hath a tongue, I say is no man, if with his tongue he cannot win a woman.”
Source: The Two Gentlemen of Verona
