Quotes By Anais Nin

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

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

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.

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

Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.

How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.

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

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.

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

I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.

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

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

If all of us acted in unison as I act individually there would be no wars and no poverty. I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way.

Good things happen to those who hustle.

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.

Dreams are necessary to life.

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

When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.

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

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

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

Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.

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

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.

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

A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked.

Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.

Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.

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.

Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.