For perspective: Western philosophy basically began with Thales of Miletus. Only 4 sentences that remained. Post more bangers.

"It is often said that definitions state the meaning of words. This is true, but it is not exact. A word is merely a visual or auditory symbol used to represent a concept. A word has no meaning other than that of the concept it symbolizes, and the meaning of a concept consists of its units. It is not words, but concepts that man defines - by specifying their referent. The purpose of a definition is to distinguish a concept from all other concepts and thus to keep its units differentiated from all other existence." Ayn Rand Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology

I had to take a picture of this page, hang it in the museum of human thought:

Crucial formulation by Ayn Rand, they all are, this is fundamental and the last part some of her best writing. “Measurement is the identification of a relationship in numerical terms — and the complexity of the science of measurement indicates the complexity of the relationships which exist in the universe and which man has barely begun to investigate. They exist, even if the appropriate standards and methods of measurement are not always as easily apparent, nor the degree of achievable precision as great as in the case of measuring the basic perceptually given attributes of matter. If anything were actually 'immeasurable,' it would bear no relationship of any kind to the rest of the universe. It would not affect nor be affected by anything else in the manner whatever. It would enact no causes and bear no consequences — in short, it would not exist. The motive of the anti-measurement attitude is obvious. It is the desire to preserve a sanctuary of the indeterminate for the benefit of the irrational. The desire, epistemologically, to escape from the responsibility of cognitive precision and wide-scale integration, and metaphysically, the desire to escape from the absolutism of existence, of facts, of reality, and above all, of identity." Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology

"A certain aspect of the epistemological state of today's culture is worth noting at this point. Observe that the attacks on the conceptual level of man's consciousness (i.e., on reason) come from the same ideological quarters as the attacks on measurement. When discussing man's consciousness, particularly his emotions, some persons use the word 'measurement' as a pejorative term - as if an attempt to apply it to the phenomena of consciousness was a gross, insulting 'materialistic' impropriety. The question 'Can you measure love?' is an example and a symptom of that attitude. As in many other issues, the two allegedly opposite camps are merely two variants growing out of the same basic premise. The old-fashioned mystics proclaim that you cannot measure love in pounds, inches, or dollars. They are aided and abetted by the neo-mystics who - punch-drunk with undigested concepts of measurement, proclaiming measurement to be the sole tool of science - proceed to measure knee-jerks, statistical questionnaires, and the learning time of rats as indices of the human psyche. Both camps fail to observe that measurement requires an appropriate standard, and that the physical sciences, which one passionately hates and the other passionately envies/one does not measure length in pounds or weight in inches. Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology

“Now, a word about grammar. Grammar is a science dealing with the formulation of the proper methods of verbal expression and communication (i.e., the methods of organizing words and concepts into sentences). Grammar pertains to the actions of consciousness and involves a number of special concepts, such as conjunctions, which are concepts denoting relationships among thoughts ("and," "but," "or," etc.). These concepts are formed by retaining the distinguishing characteristics of a relationship and omitting the particular thoughts involved. The purpose of conjunctions is verbal economy. They serve to integrate and/or condense the content of certain thoughts.” Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. P.S. Leonard Peikoff's Principles of Grammar book is an excellent follow-up to this text.

"Concepts of method represent a large part of man's conceptual equipment. Epistemology is a science devoted to the discovery of the proper methods of acquiring and validating knowledge. Ethics is a science devoted to the discovery of the proper methods of living one's life. Medicine is a science devoted to the discovery of the proper methods of curing disease. All the applied sciences (i.e., technology) are sciences devoted to the discovery of methods." Ayn Rand Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology

"In the spiritual realm (and by that I mean pertaining to consciousness), the currency - which exists in limited quantity and must be teleologically measured in the pursuit of any value - is time, i.e., one's life. Since a value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep, and the amount of possible action is limited by the duration of one's lifespan, it is a part of one's life that one invests in everything one values. The years, the months, days, or hours of thought, of interest, of action devoted to a value are the currency with which one pays for the enjoyment one receives from it." Ayn Rand Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology Reminds me of another quote from Simon and Garfunkel: “Time, time, time, see what’s become of me, as I looked around at my possibilities, I was so hard to please.” -Hazy Shade of Winter

"Measurement is the identification of a relationship - a quantitative relationship established by means of a standard that serves as a unit. Teleological measurement deals not with cardinal, but with ordinal numbers - and the standard serves to establish a graded relationship of means to end. For instance, a moral code is a system of teleological measurement which grades the choices and actions open to man according to the degree to which they achieve or frustrate the code's standard of value. The standard is the end to which man's actions are the means." Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology

"It is only in relation to the external world that the various actions of a consciousness can be experienced, grasped, defined, or communicated. Awareness is awareness of something. A contentless state of consciousness is a contradiction in terms. Two fundamental attributes are involved in every state, aspect, or function of a man's consciousness: content and action - the content of awareness and the action of consciousness in regard to that content." Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology

"Thus the process of forming and applying concepts contains the essential pattern of two fundamental methods of cognition: induction and deduction. The process of observing the facts of reality and of integrating them into concepts is, in essence, a process of induction. The process of subsuming new instances under a known concept is, in essence, a process of deduction." Ayn Rand Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology

“Two links between the conceptual and the mathematical fields are worth noting at this point, apart from the obvious fact that the concept “unit” is the base and start of both: 1. A concept is not formed by observing every concrete subsumed under it and does not specify the number of such concretes. A concept is like an arithmetical sequence of specifically defined units going off in both directions, open at both ends, and including all units of that particular kind. For instance, the concept "man" includes all men who live at present, who have ever lived, or will ever live. 2. The basic principle of concept formation (which states that the omitted measurements must exist in some quantity but may exist in any quantity) is the equivalent of the basic principle of algebra, which states that algebraic symbols must be given some numerical value but may be given any value. In this sense and respect, the perceptual awareness is the arithmetic, but the conceptual awareness is the algebra of cognition. Ayn Rand Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology

"There is evidence to suppose that written language originated in the form of drawings - as the pictographic writing of the Oriental peoples seems to indicate. With the growth of man's knowledge and of his power of abstraction, a pictorial representation of concepts could no longer be adequate to his conceptual range and was replaced by a fully symbolic code." Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology

"A child learns to count when he is learning his first words, and in order to proceed beyond the stage of counting his ten fingers, it is the conceptual level of his consciousness that man has to expand." Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology

"The purpose of measurement is to expand the range of man's consciousness of his knowledge beyond the perceptual level: beyond the direct power of his senses and the immediate concretes of any given moment. Man can perceive the length of one foot directly. He cannot perceive 10 miles. By establishing the relationship of feet to miles, he can grasp and know any distance on Earth. By establishing the relationship of miles to light years, he can know the distances of galaxies." Ayn Rand Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology

"This is the key, the entrance to the conceptual level of man's consciousness. The ability to regard entities as units is man's distinctive method of cognition, which other living species are unable to follow. Thus the concept "unit" is a bridge between metaphysics and epistemology: units do not exist qua units. What exist are things, but units are things viewed by a consciousness in certain existing relationships. With the grasp of the implicit concept "unit," man reaches the conceptual level of cognition, which consists of two interrelated fields: the conceptual and the mathematical. The process of concept formation is in large part a mathematical process." Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology

"The problem might appear to be esoteric. Let me remind you that the fate of human societies, of knowledge, of science, of progress, and of every human life depends on it. What is at stake here is the cognitive efficacy of man's mind." Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology

“The issue of concepts, known as the problem of universals, is philosophy's central issue. Since man's knowledge is gained and held in conceptual form, the validity of man's knowledge depends on the validity of concepts. But concepts are abstractions, or universals, and everything that man perceives is particular, concrete. What is the relationship between abstractions and concretes? To what precisely do concepts refer in reality? Do they refer to something real, something that exists — or are they merely inventions of man's mind, arbitrary constructs or loose approximations that cannot claim to represent knowledge?” Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology

"When you complete your screenplay, you've accomplished a tremendous achievement. You've taken an idea, expanded it into a dramatic or comedic storyline, then sat down and spent several weeks or months writing it, inception through completion. It's a satisfying and rewarding experience. It's been your best friend and your worst enemy. It keeps you up nights and lets you sleep like a baby. "True art is in the doing of it," Jean Renoir.” Syd Fields Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting

"Hollywood is a 'dream factory,' a town of talkers. Go to any of the various hangouts around town, and you'll hear people talking about the scripts they're going to write, the movies they're going to produce, and the deals they're going to make. It's all talk. Action is character, right? What a person does, and not what he says, is who he is." Syd Fields Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting