Anais Nin Quotes

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

The only way to deal with temptation is to give in to it.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.

Dreams are necessary to life.

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go.

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishing.

You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating.

I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.

Anais Nin Quotes part 2

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back: a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic – in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world.

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.

I hate men who are afraid of women’s strength.

I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ.

I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself. To cut yourself out of stone.

I write emotional algebra.

There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.

I forget very little, but I have it gloriously mixed up.

Age does not protect us from love, but love, to some extent, protects us from age.

Good things happen to those who hustle.

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

You cannot save people. You can only love them.

People living deeply have no fear of death.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see.

Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.

Why do so many people equate criticism with envy?

Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.

There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.

What I cannot love, I overlook.

We are going to the moon; that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself.

I feel sorry for anyone who is in a place where he feels strange and stupid.

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.

The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.

It’s all fiction. But by making it fiction, you are allowed to admit certain truths, to say things which you could not otherwise say.

I am only responsible for my own heart.

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.

The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.