Emma

“I don’t think man was meant to attain happiness so easily. Happiness is like those palaces in fairy tales whose gates are guarded by dragons: we must fight in order to conquer it.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“People don't want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they'll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue - a highly intellectual virtue - out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt... They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“How we squander our sorrows, gazing beyond them
into the sad wastes of duration,
to see if maybe they have a limit.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“Fransisco, what's the most depraved type of human being?

-The man without purpose.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged