Quotes from book

The Fountainhead

“One must never allow oneself to acquire an exaggerated sense of one's own importance. There's no necessity to burden oneself with absolutes”

“Patience is always rewarded and romance is always round the corner!”

“Genius is an exaggeration of dimension. So is elephantiasis. Both may be only a disease.”

“Thousands of years ago the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burnt at the stake he'd taught his brothers to light, but he left them a gift they had not conceived and he lifted darkness from the face of the Earth.”

“To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that's much harder?”

“I love you so much that nothing can matter to me - not even you… Only my love- not your answer. Not even your indifference”

“She did not know what it was about him that had always made her want to see him broken.”

“She knew that even pain can be confessed, but to confess happiness is to stand naked, delivered to the witness…”

“I don't want to see you. I don't like you. I don't like your face. You look like an insufferable egotist. You're impertinent. You're too sure of yourself. Twenty years ago I would have punched your face with the greatest of pleasure.”

“Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.”

“Is it advisable to spread out all the conveniences of culture before people to whom a few steps up a stair to a library is a sufficient deterrent from reading?”

“Compromise now, because you'll have to later, anyway, only then you'll have gone through things you'll wish you hadn't.”

“Do you mean to tell me that you're thinking seriously of building, when and if you are an architect?”
“Yes.”
“My dear fellow, who will let you?”
“That’s not the point. The point is, who will stop me?”

“Don't worry. They're all against me. But I have one advantage: they don't know what they want. I do.”

“It's such a waste to be subtle and vicious with people who don't even know that you're being subtle and vicious”

“Don't think. Believe. Trust your heart, not your brain. Don't think. Feel. Believe.”

“The causes of illusions are not pretty to discover. They're either vicious or tragic.”

“Never ask people. Not about your work. Don't you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?”