209 Quotes About Romanticism

Why do human beings cling with such strength to thoughts and opinions, as if they were what is eternal? Why can they die for them, when precisely these thoughts are lost with their death?

Those novels with old-fashioned heroes and heroines in them -- are ruinous!

I tried not to stare at his body because I already knew it was good. Instead I focused on his eyes.

This was how it was done; you bare your belly to a great beast and endure trials and it all works itself out. There is a treasure or a sword. Or a woman. And that thing is yours not because you defeated anything, or because your flesh was hard and unyielding, but because you were worthy of it, worthy all along.

For the first time she knew and loved the Spirit of good and beauty, an affinity to which affords the greatest bliss that our nature can receive.

Art is a concretization of metaphysics. Art brings man’s concepts to the perceptual level of his consciousness and allows him to grasp them directly, as if they were percepts.This is the psycho-epistemological function of art and the reason of its importance in man’s life (and the crux of the Objectivist esthetics)

My delusions of grandeur are steadily becoming a reality of grandeur.

Study of the past often turns into love of the past and a desire to keep it.

[E]ach individual is holy, it is God’s work, it is its own purpose. If it becomes what it can become according to its nature, then it has done enough, and what it profits others is a side issue.