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Quote by Harry D Howard

“You receive the greatest amount of pleasure during the activity, not the outcome. The outcome is just an ending.”

Quote by Harry D Howard

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Harry D Howard

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“Man’s mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch – or build a cyclotron – without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think. “But to think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call ‘human nature,’ the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs, or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival – so that for you, who are a human being, the question ‘to be or not to be’ is the question ‘to think or not to think.’ . . . “Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. . . Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer – and that is the way he has acted through most of his history (pages 1012-1013).”

ThinkingPhilosophyAtlasGaltFoce
Author:Ayn Rand
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“Alex moves from New York to Seattle and asks me to join him. He asks me many times – sometimes insistently, sometimes pleadingly – but he never pressures me. I also never take him seriously, regarding our meetings as just a happy continuation of our summer romance. I don’t believe for a second that he actually means it, and I don’t hear him when he says he has built my dream house by the sea. As I mentioned before, I have always known where my horizons are and have no illusions on that score. But, most importantly, what could be worse than destroying your family for your own selfish pleasure?! Hurting those closest to me for some, no doubt temporary, fool’s paradise in America is just never going to happen. I could never do it.”

PleasureSelfishnessAsk
Book:Monogamy Book One. Lover
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“When December comes, you say you wish the holidays were already over and done with and well behind us, and I think you pretend to hate happiness in order to make yourself believe that, if your life seems an unhappy one, at least you’re the one who chose it. As if you wanted to pretend you had some control over your own unhappiness. As if you wanted to give the impression that, if your life was too hard, you wanted it that way, out of disgust with pleasure, out of a loathing for joy.”

HappinessPleasureUnhappiness
Book:Qui a tué mon père
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“Nevertheless, there are many respects, in tiny and contemptible matters, where our curiosity is provoked every day. How often do we slip, who can count? How many times we initially act as if we put up with people telling idle tales in order not to offend the weak, but then gradually we find pleasure in listening. I now do not watch a dog chase a rabbit when this is happening at the circus. But if by chance I am passing when coursing occurs in the countryside, it distracts me perhaps indeed from thinking out some weighty matter. The hunt turns me to an interest in the sport, not enough to lead me to alter the direction of the beast I am riding, but shifting the inclination of my heart. Unless you had proved to me my infirmity and quickly admonished me either to take the sight as the start for some reflection enabling me to rise up to you or wholly to scorn and pass the matter by, I would be watching like an empty-headed fool. When I am sitting at home, a lizard catching flies or a spider entrapping them as they rush into its web often fascinates me. The problem is not made any different by the fact that the animals are small. The sight leads me on to praise you, the marvellous Creator and orderer of all things; but that was not how my attention first began. It is one thing to rise rapidly, another thing not to fall.”

PleasureCuriosityFallingAugustineAppetitesFallenness
Book:Confessions
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