Beware of allowing a tactless word, a rebuttal, a rejection to obliterate the whole sky.
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
- Topic: Truth
More Quotes from Anais Nin
The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.
The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
It was while helping others to be free that I gained my own freedom.
More on Truth
I propose to raise a revolution against the lie that the majority has the monopoly of the truth.
I am a true laborer: I earn that I eat, get that I wear, owe no man hate, envy no man’s happiness, glad of other men’s good, content with my harm.
A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true.
It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.
No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.
The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.
If you compromise your own conscience, you will weaken your conscience. Soon your conscience will fail to guide you and you never will have real wealth based on peace of mind.
I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
For truth is precious and divine—too rich a perl for carnal swine.
We should seek the truth without hesitation; and, if we refuse it, we show that we value the esteem of men more than the search for truth.
There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.
Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.
We know how to speak many falsehoods which resemble real things, but we know, when we will, how to speak true things.