The Fountainhead Quotes....Part 1

I had started a blog last year...but i wasn't sure of what to should i write and also how to go about this entire thing. This was before I read 'The Fountainhead'. As soon as I finished the book, i knew, this is something with which I would like to start my blog again!

One of the quotes was by Dominique Francon..I liked it so much, that I decided to use it for naming my blog!

These are some of the quotes I really liked in 'The Fountainhead'. I am posting part 1 today!

Here they come!


(The quotes in bold are my personal favourites.....)

THE FOUNTAINHEAD Quotes.......


1) Dean: "My dear fellow, who will let you?"
Roark: "That's not the point. The point is, who will stop me".

2) Speaking to the Dean about following the rules, Roark says: "Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it's made up of one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose. A man doesn't borrow the pieces of his body. A building doesn't borrow hunks of its own soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window and stairway to express it."

3) Roark to Dean: "Every man creates his meaning and form and goal. Why is it so important ----- what others have done? Why does it become so sacred by the mere fact of not being your own? Why is anyone and everyone right ----- so long as it's not yourself? Why does the number of those others take the place of the truth? Why is truth made a mere matter of arithmetic ----- and only of addition at that? Why is everything twisted out of all sense to fit everything else?"

4) Roark to Dean: "I have, let's say, sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I've chosen the work I want to do. If i find no joy in it, then I'm only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And i can find the joy only if i do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is the matter of standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one."

5) Dean: "You know, you would sound much more convincing if you sounded like if you spoke as if you cared whether i agreed with you or not".
Roark: "That's true. I don't care whether you agree with me or not."

6) Roark to Peter when asked for advice: "You've made a mistake already. By asking me. Never ask people. Not about your work. Don't you know what you want you want? How can you stand it, not to know?"

7)Peter: "But i mean it. How do you always manage to decide?"
Roark: "How can you let others decide for you?"

8) Men hate passion, any great passion. Henry Cameron made a mistake: he loved his work. That was why he fought. That was why he lost.

9) Catherine to Peter: "I don't want to change you. I love you, Peter."

10) Cameron to Roark: "But it's not that. You love your work. God help you, you love it! And that's the curse. That's the brand on your forehead for all of them to see. You love it, and they know it, and they know they have you. Don't you ever look up at the people on the street. Aren't you afraid of them? I am. They move past you and they wear hats and they carry bundles. But that's not the substance of them. The substance of them is hatred for any man who loves his work. That's the only kind they fear. I don't know why. You're opening yourself up, Rowark, for each and every one of them"

11) Roark to Austin Heller: "A house can have integrity like a person and just as seldom."

12) Dominique to Alvah Scarret: "If i found a job, a project, an ideal or a person I wanted ----- I'd have to depend on the whole world. Everything has strings leading to everything else. We're all so tied up altogether. We're all in a net, the net is waiting, and, we're pushed into it by one single desire. You want a thing and it's precious to you. Do you know who is standing ready to tear it out of your hands? You can't know, it may be some so involved and so far away, but someone is ready, and you're afraid of them all. And you just cringe and crawl and you beg and you accept them ---- just so they'll let you keep it. And look at whom you come to accept."

13) Dominique to Alvah Scarret about mankind: "You know, it's such a peculiar thing ---- our idea of mankind in general. We all have a sort of vague, gl
owing picture when we say that, something solemn, big and important. but actually all we know of it is the people we meet in our lifetime. Look at them. Do you know any of you'd feel big and solemn about? There's nothing but houswives haggling at pushcarts, drooling brats who write dirty words on the sidewalks and drunk debutantes. Or their spiritual equivalents. As a matter of fact, one can feel respect for people when they suffer. They have certain dignity. But have you ever looked at them when they are enjying themselves? That's when you see the truth. Look at those who spend the money they've slaved for and have the whole world open to them. Observe what they pick out for enjoyment. Watch them in their smarter speak-easies. That's your mankind in general. i don't want to touch it."

14) Alvah: "What do you want? Perfection?"
Dominique: "------or nothing. So, you see, I take nothing."

15) Alvah: "What do you call freedom?"
Dominique: "To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing"

16) Roark explaining to Nathaniel Janns about why buildings must not be a combination of variety of styles: "Why wouldn't you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaved like acanthus leaves? It would be ornamental, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have now. Well, why don't you like the idea? Because it would be useless and pointless. beacause the beauty of the human body is that it hasn't a single muscle which doesn't serve its purpose; that there's not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man."

17) Roark's answer to Mr. Jann's question on why he thinks people don't want reason on their side: "It's not you, mr. Janns. It's the way most people feel. They have to take a chance, everything they do is taking a chance, but they feel so much safer when they take it on something they know to be ugly, vain and stupid.

18) Dominique to Peter when he proposes his love to her: "Peter, if i ever want to punish myself for something terrible, if i ever want yo myself disgustingly ----- I'll marry you. Consider it a promise."

19) Roark to Peter when the latter tries to bribe him to keep his quite about the Cosmo-Slotnik Building under the pretext of helping him: "And here's my bribe to you Peter. For the same purpose. To keep your mouth shut."

20) Roark smiled. He looked down at his drawings. His elbow moved a little, pressing them to his body. He said: "That's the most selfish thing you've ever seen a man do."

21) Peter's (second hander's) philosophy in life: "A thing is not high if one can reach it; it is not great if one can reason it; it is not deep if one can see its bottom" --------- this had always been his credo, unstated and unquestioned. This spared him any attempt to reach, reason or see; and it cast a nice reflection of scorn on those who made the attempt.

22) Ellsworth Toohey to Mrs. Halcombe: "There's nothing as significant as the human face. nor as eloquent. We can never really know a person except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance we know everything. Even though we're not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge."

23) Ellsworth Toohey to Dominique: "No man likes to be beaten. But to be beaten by a man who has always stood as a particular example of mediocrity
in his eyes, top start by the side of this mediocrity and to watch it shoot up, while he struggles and gets nothing but a boot in his face, to see the mediocrity snatch from him, one after another, the chances he'd have given his life for, to see the mediocrity worshipped, to miss the place he wants and to see mediocrity enshrined upon it, to lose, to be sacrificed, to be ignored, to be beaten, beaten, beaten --------not by a greater genius, not by god, but by a Peter Keating ---- well, my little amateur, do you think the Spanish Inquisition ever thought of torture to equal this?"

24) "Every loneliness is a pinnacle"

25) Allies never trust each other. But that doesn't spoil their effectiveness.

26) Why the sensation of one felt in dreams were so much more intense than anything once could experience in waking reality ---- what is the extra quality which would never be recaptured afterwards; the quality of what he felt when he walked down a path through tangled green leaves in a dream, in an air full of expectation, of causeless, utter rapture ----- and when he awakened he could not explain it, it had been just a path through some wood.

27) Lansing to Roark: "When facing society, the man most concerned, the man who is to do the most and contribute the most, has the least say. It's taken for granted that he has no voice and the reasons he could offer are rejected in advance as prejuduced ---------- since no speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It's so much easier to pass the judgement on a man than on an idea."

28) Lansing to Roark: "Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea. That presupposes the ability to think. Thinking is something one doesn't borrow or pawn. And yet, if i were asked to choose a symbol for humanity as we know it, I would not choose a cross nor an eagle nor a lion and unicorn. I'd choose three gilded balls."

29) Lansing: "They don't know what they want. I do."

30) Mallory to Roark: "Have you seen your best friends love everything about you ----- except the things that count? And your most important is nothing to them, nothing, not even sound they can recognize.

31) Mallory to Roark: "..., what's the most horrible experience you can imagine? To me --- it's being left, unarmed, in a sealed cell with a drooling beast of a prey or a maniac who'd had some disease that's eaten his brains out. You'd have nothing then but your voice ---- your voice and your thought. You'd scream to that creature why it should not touch you, you'd have the most eloquent words, the unanswerable words, you'd become the vessel of the absolute truth. And you'd see living eyes watching you and you'd know that the thing can't hear you, that it can't be reached, not reached, not in any way, yet it's breathing and it's moving there before you with a purpose of its own. That's horror. Well, that's what's hanging over the world, prowling somewhere through the mankind, the same thing, something closed, mindless, utterky wanton, but something with an aim and a cunning of its own. I don't think I'm a coward, but I'm afraid of it. And that's all I know ---- only that it exists. I don't know its purpose, I don't know its nature."

32) Dominique Francon's testimony for the Stoddard Temple: "Howard Roark built a temple to the human spirit. He saw man as strong, proud, clean, wise and fearless. He saw man as a heroic being. And he built a temple to that. A temple is a place where man is to expeirience exhaltation. He thought that exhaltation comes from the conscious being guiltless, of seeing the truth and achieving it, of living upto one's highest possibility, of knowing no shame and having no cause for shame, of being able to stan naked in full sunlight. He thought exhaltation means joy and that joy is man's birthright. He thought that a place built as a setting for man is a sacred place. That is Howard Roark thought of man and exhaltation."

33) Roark to Dominique: "To say 'I Love You' one must learn how to say the 'I'".


34) Roark to Austen Heller: "Most people say that they are concerned with the suffering of others. I am not. And yet there's one thing i can't understand. Most of them would not pass by if they saw a man bleeding in the road, mangled by a hit-and-run driver."