“My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.”

—  Ayn Rand , book Anthem

Source: Anthem

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose." by Ayn Rand?
Ayn Rand photo
Ayn Rand 322
Russian-American novelist and philosopher 1905–1982

Related quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche photo

“Not every end is the goal. The end of a melody is not its goal,  and yet if  a melody has not  reached its end, it has not reached its goal.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Variant: The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.

Peter Wessel Zapffe photo

“Mankind ought to end its existence of its own will.”

Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899–1990) Norwegian philosopher, mountaineer, and author

Source: The Last Messiah (1933), To Be a Human Being https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4m6vvaY-Wo&t=1110s (1989–90)

Michael J. Sandel photo
Harry V. Jaffa photo

“Nor is its influence by any means at an end”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

Source: 2000s, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000), p. 223
Context: This remarkable address conveys, more than any other contemporary document, not only the soul of the Confederacy but also of that Jim Crow South that arose from the ashes of the Confederacy. From the end of Reconstruction until after World War II, the idea of racial inequality gripped the territory of the former Confederacy, and not only of the former Confederacy, more profoundly than it had done under slavery. Nor is its influence by any means at an end. Stephens's prophecy of the Confederacy's future resembles nothing so much as Hitler's prophecies of the Thousand-Year Reich. Nor are their theories very different. Stephens, unlike Hitler, spoke only of one particular race as inferior. But the principle of racial domination, once established, can easily be extended to fit the convenience of the self-anointed master race or class, whoever it may be.

Miguel de Unamuno photo

“The vain man is in like cause with the avaricious — he takes the mean for the end; forgetting the end he pursues the means for its own sake and goes no further. The seeming to be something, conducive to being it, ends by forming our objective.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), III : The Hunger of Immortality
Context: The vain man is in like cause with the avaricious — he takes the mean for the end; forgetting the end he pursues the means for its own sake and goes no further. The seeming to be something, conducive to being it, ends by forming our objective. We need that others should believe in our superiority to them in order that we may believe in it ourselves, and upon their belief base our faith in our own persistence, or at least in the persistence of our fame. We are more grateful to him that congratulates us on the skill with which we defend a cause than we are to him who recognizes the truth or goodness of the cause itself. A rabid mania for originality is rife in the modern intellectual world and characterizes all individual effort. We would rather err with genius than hit the mark with the crowd.

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton photo

“We must not pursue science for ends independent of science. It must be pursued for its own sake, and must lead to its own results.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

Private journal (1858), quoted in Gertrude Himmelfarb, Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics (1952), p. 40

Ayn Rand photo
Aristotle photo

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

Aristotle (-384–-321 BC) Classical Greek philosopher, student of Plato and founder of Western philosophy
Gretchen Rubin photo

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

Gretchen Rubin (1966) American writer

Source: The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

Karl Jaspers photo

“When language is used without true significance, it loses its purpose as a means of communication and becomes an end in itself.”

Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) German psychiatrist and philosopher

Man in the Modern Age (1933)

Related topics