Famous Quotes & Sayings

Azar Nafisi

What we search for in fiction is not so much reality, but the epiphany of truth.

Azar Nafisi

Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies.

Azar Nafisi

Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.

Ayn Rand

Rationalization is a cover-up, a process of providing one's emotions with a false identity, of giving them spurious explanations and justifications - in order to hide one's motives, not just from others, but primarily from oneself. The price of rationalizing is the hampering, the distortion, and, ultimately, the destruction of one's cognitive faculty. Rationalization is a process not of perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one's emotions.

Ayn Rand

But what man does out of despair, is not necessarily a key to his character. I have always thought that the real key is in that which he seeks for his enjoyment.

Ayn Rand

When one turns from reason to faith, when one rejects the absolutism of reality, one undercuts the absolutism of one's consciousness - and one's mind becomes an organ one cannot trust any longer. It becomes what the mystics claim it to be: a tool of distortion.

Ayn Rand

Are my characters copies of people in real life? ... Don't ever believe the stories about authors putting people into novels. That idea is a kind of joke on both authors and readers. All the readers believe that authors do it. All the authors know that it can't be done.

Ayn Rand

Do you know that my personal crusade in life (in the philosophical sense) is not merely to fight collectivism, nor to fight altruism? These are only consequences, effects, not causes. I am out after the real cause, the real root of evil on earth the irrational.

Ayn Rand

[T]he only real moral crime that one man can commit against another is the attempt to create, by his words or actions, an impression of the contradictory, the impossible, the irrational, and thus shake the concept of rationality in his victim.

Ayn Rand

Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever.

Ayn Rand

Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper

Ayn Rand

I saw that evil was impotent—that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real—and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it.

Ayn Rand

Reality confronts man with a great many musts, but all of them are conditional the formula of realistic necessity is You must, if and the if stands for man's choice

Ayn Rand

They proclaim that every man is entitled to exist without labor and, the laws of reality to the contrary notwithstanding, is entitled to receive his 'minimum sustenance' his food, his clothes, his shelter with no effort on his part, as his due and his birthright. To receive it from whom.

Ayn Rand

But a few understand that building is a great symbol we live in our minds, and existence is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality, to state it in gesture and form. For the man who understands this, a house he owns is a statement of his life.

Ayn Rand

You who prattle that morality is social and that man would need no morality on a desert island - it is on a desert island that he would need it most. Let him try to claim, when there are no victims to pay for it, that a rock is a house, that sand is clothing, that food will drop into his mouth without cause or effort, that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring his stock seed today - and reality will wipe him out, as he deserves; reality will show him that life is a value to be bought and that thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it.

Ayn Rand

I write - and read - for the sake of the story... My basic test for any story is: 'Would I want to meet these characters and observe these events in real life? Is this story an experience worth living through for its own sake? Is the pleasure of contemplating these characters an end itself?

Ayn Rand

Rationalization is a process of not perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one’s emotions.

Ayn Rand

To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power.

Ayn Rand

We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality

Ayn Rand

To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.

Ayn Rand

You can ignore reality, but you can't ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.

Ayn Rand

Do not let your fire go out ... Do not let the Hero in your soul perish ... Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.

Atticus Shaffer

It is a surreal life living on a television series set, and especially when I go out in public. I have people who recognize me and will come up to me, saying how much they enjoy seeing me, asking for a picture, and I still think to myself, "Uh, why?"

Aubrey O'Day

One thing I think celebrities shy away from is exposing the reality that we're all the same. Somebody's not more important because they have a Bentley or a big house or a famous boyfriend or plastic surgery - we're all the same.

Aubrey O'Day

I would rather be hated every damn day of my life for being real than loved for being something I'm not.

Aubrey O'Day

For me, I feel like reality TV is anything but these days.

Bertrand Russell

The man who is unhappy will, as a rule, adopt an unhappy creed, while the man who is happy will adopt a happy creed; each may attribute his happiness or unhappiness to his beliefs, while the real causation is the other way round.

Bertrand Russell

Real life is, to most men, a long second best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.

Bertrand Russell

Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument. "I think, therefore I am" says rather more than is strictly certain. It might seem as though we are quite sure of being the same person to-day as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense. But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table, and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences.

Bertrand Russell

I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds.

Benjamin Bratt

I believe there's a huge distinction between un macho and a real man. I don't think you have to be one to be another.

Benjamin Bratt

The whole thing about acting, the draw for me, is the opportunity to do things you don't get to do in real life.