Thanks for your comments. As usual, Rand seems to have stimulated your brains!

Here are a few short quotes from Ayn Rand’s “Romantic Manifesto“. (Signet Centennial edition 1975).

As man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul.” (p. 169, quoted from “Atlas Shrugged“).

Art is the technology of the soul. (p. 169)

art does not teach – it shows (p. 169)

Art gives [man] the experience of seeing the full, immediate, concrete reality of his distant goals.

Art – the integrator of metaphysics, the concretizer of man’s widest abstractions (p. 124)

not a theoretical principle, not a didactic “message”, but the life-giving fact of experiencing a moment of metaphysical joy – a moment of love for existence. (p. 170)

a beacon raised over the dark crossroads of the world, saying: “This is possible!”

Where… can a child learn the concept of moral values and of a moral character in whose image he will shape his own soul?

What Romantic art offers… is not moral rules… but the image of a moral person – i.e. the concretized abstraction of a moral ideal. (p. 146)

Romantic art is a man’s first glimpse of a moral sense of life (p.  152)

Romantic art is the fuel and the spark plug of a man’s soul; its task is to set a soul on fire and never let it go out. (p. 152)