IX. 
IF YOU FAIL TO BE TRUE, 
YOU WILL FAIL TO BE AN ARTIST. 

Hard Work + Persistence = Guaranteed Success
Learn to adjust the sails of your life to unpredictable winds, while keeping your focus clear on your destination. And keep sailing until you get there.
shades of grey
“We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.”  {WMail Issue #48}
“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” (appendix to ‘Atlas Shrugged’)
“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.”
— Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)

“People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.”
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

“I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.”
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

“The truth is not for all men but only for those who seek it.”
— Ayn Rand

All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don’t sit looking at it – walk.”
— Ayn Rand

“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
— Charles Bukowski

“those who escape hell
however
never talk about
it
and nothing much
bothers them
after
that.”
— Charles Bukowski

“You have to die a few times before you can really
live.”
— Charles Bukowski

“Life’s as kind as you let it be.”
— Charles Bukowski

“unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don’t do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don’t do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.”
— Charles Bukowski

-RB