Quotes By Anais Nin

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

I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.

Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.

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

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

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.

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

People living deeply have no fear of death.

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.

What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.

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.

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

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.

My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.

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