"...Extrospectively, the sense of life of another person strikes one as an immediate, yet undefinable, impression - on very short acquaintance - an impression which often feels like certainty, yet is exasperatingly elusive, if one attempts to verify it.
"This leads many people to regard a sense of life as the province of some sort of special intuition, as a matter perceivable only by some special, non-rational insight. The exact opposite is true: a sense of life is not an irreducible primary, but a very complex sum; it can be felt - but it cannot be understood - by an automatic reaction, it has to be analyzed, identified and verified conceptually. That automatic impression - of oneself or of others - is only a lead. But if and when that intangible impression is supported by and unites with the conscious judgment of one's mind, the result is the most exultant form of certainty one can ever experience: it is the integration of mind and values.
"...One falls in love with the embodiment of the values that form a person's character, which are reflected in his widest goals or smallest gestures, which create the style of his soul - the individual style of a unique, unrepeatable, irreplacable consciousness. It is one's own sense of life that acts as the selector, and responds to what it recognizes as one's own basic values in the person of another. It is not (simply) a matter of professed convictions; it is a matter of much more profound, conscious and subconscious harmony."
- Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto
