Atlas Quotes

Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value.

Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.

Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

As for me, I did the stupidest thing in my life, which is saying a lot. I attacked the Titan Lord Atlas.

My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?

If one's actions are honest, one does not need the predated confidence of others.

What is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

I always like to have an atlas just so that I can find things out. It's always good to have an almanac; those sort of things.

I understand now that boundaries between noise and sound are conventions. All boundaries are conventions, waiting to be transcended. One may transcend any convention if only one can first conceive of doing so.

For my birthday that year Anne gave me an inflatable atlas globe, along with a birthday card in which she wrote: I give you the world. Have fun blowing it up.

I [had] added another small piece to the pages of the atlas that were real to me.

Atlas isn't carrying the world on his shoulders, no giant muscular hulk with a sense of responsibility; the world is balanced on a pyramid of clowns, and they are always tooting horns and wobbling and goosing each other.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

By each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

Can someone explain the vitriol whenever Ayn Rand comes up? 'Atlas' is the greatest motivator for the individual that I can imagine.

See me looking like Atlas, when he handle the globe. I see you looking like Alice, Wonderland is your home. It makes me wonder if you practice your flow.

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.

I feel like something important has happened to me. Is this possible?

The Revelation of Sonmi 451 To be is to be perceived, and so to know thyself is only possible through the eyes of the other. The nature of our immortal lives is in the consequences of our words and deeds, that go on and are pushing themselves throughout all time. - Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them.

Truth is singular. Its 'versions' are mistruths.

Drop the idea that you are Atlas carrying the world on your shoulders. The world would go on even without you. Don't take yourself so seriously.

I tend to really be partial to Ayn Rand, and to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can't stand still. It must grow or perish.

Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted.

Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

In the morning, we carry the world like Atlas; at noon, we stoop and bend beneath it; and at night, it crushes us flat to the ground.

What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.

If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - What would you tell him?" I…don't know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?" To shrug.

You are not Atlas carrying the world on your shoulder. It is good to remember that the planet is carrying you.

Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.

When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?

Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter.

I want every fan of Rand to hear [Polaha] say the classic Galt phrase: “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

Atlas, we read in ancient song, Was so exceeding tall and strong, He bore the skies upon his back, Just as the pedler does his pack; But, as the pedler overpress'd Unloads upon a stall to rest, Or, when he can no longer stand, Desires a friend to lend a hand, So Atlas, lest the ponderous spheres Should sink, and fall about his ears, Got Hercules to bear the pile, That he might sit and rest awhile.

Get the hell out of my way!

An Atlas, whose back is bowed and whose hands are busy holding up the world, has no arms to lift to deal with his own defense. Increase his burdens and you will crush him...This is our present posture...This suggestions I make...would...conserve American lives for American ends.

On my tenth birthday a bicycle and an atlas coincided as gifts, and a few days later I decided to cycle to India...However, I was a cunning child so I kept my ambition to myself, thus avoiding the tolerant amusement it would have provoked among my elders.

I loved Morocco. It's very exotic and different from anywhere I've ever been. I had an amazing day there in the high Atlas Mountains near Mount Tamadot, when I rode by donkey into a Berber village and drank some mint tea with a Berber family. It was exceptional.

I kept pushing against the black, though, almost a reflex. I wasn't trying to lift it. I was just resisting. Not allowing it to crush me completely. I wasn't Atlas, and the black felt as heavy as a planet; I couldn't shoulder it. All I could do was not be entirely obliterated.

Whether or not you agree with Ayn Rand - and I have certain issues with some of her beliefs - the woman can tell a story. I mean, the novel as an art form is just in full florid bloom in 'Atlas Shrugged.' It's an unbelievable story. The characters are so compelling, and what she's saying is mind-expanding.

The diabolical thing about melancholy is not that it makes you ill but that it makes you conceited and shortsighted; yes almost arrogant. You lapse into bad taste, thinking of yourself as Heine's Atlas, whose shoulders support all the world's puzzles and agonies, as if thousands, lost in the same maze, did not endure the same agonies.

There are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood ...in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs.

Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides... I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life's voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.

Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values.

The angry men know that this golden age (of fossil fuels) has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.

In the beginning I tried to accommodate everything there that was somewhere between art and garbage and that somehow seemed important to me and a pity to throw away. After a while, some sheets in the Atlas acquired another value, after all - that is, it seemed to me that they could stand on their own terms, not only under the protection of the Atlas.

One young woman's tribute describes unwrapping her cadaver's hands and being brought up short by the realization that the nails were painted pink. "The pictures in the anatomy atlas did not show nail polish", she wrote. "Did you choose the color? Did you think that I would see it? I wanted to tell you about the inside of your hands. I want you to know you are always there when I see patients. When I palpate an abdomen, yours are the organs I imagine. When I listen to a heart, I recall holding your heart.