Top 519 Quotes & Sayings by Anais Nin
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American novelist Anais Nin.
Last updated on December 25, 2024.
How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.
Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.
If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
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.
We write to taste life twice: in the moment and in retrospection.
There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.
Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.
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.
My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.
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 personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.
What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?
We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.
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 tarnishings.
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.
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.
People living deeply have no fear of death.
The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.
The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.
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.
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 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.
Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.
Dreams are necessary to life.
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
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.
When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.
Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.
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.
The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.
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.
It's all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all.
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.
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.
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.
I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.
The human father has to be confronted and recognized as human, as man who created a child and then, by his absence, left the child fatherless and then Godless.
Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.
"We see the world as 'we' are, not as 'it' is; because it is the "I" behind the 'eye' that does the seeing."
My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts, my appearance, my talents, my flaws and to stop this incessant worrying that I can’t be loved as I am.
Pain is something to master, not to wallow in.
You cannot save people. You can only love them.
Whenever you do something that is not aligned with the yearning or your soul—you create suffering.
Tranquillity is contagious, peace is contagious. One only thinks of the contagiousness of illness, but there is the contagion of serenity and joy.
My life is not possible to tell. I change every day, change my patterns, my concepts, my interpretations. I am a series of moods and sensations. I play a thousand roles. I weep when I find others play them for me. My real self is unknown. My work is merely an essence of this vast and deep adventure.
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. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
Don't let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.
it was while helping others to be free that I gained my own freedom.
When you possess light within, you see it externally.
With her eyes alone she could give this response, this absolutely erotic response, as if febrile waves were trembling there, pools of madness... something devouring that could lick a man all over like a flame, annihilate him, with a pleasure never known before.
I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.
You are the poet, you walk inside my dreams.
I want to love you wildly. I don’t want words, but inarticulate cries, meaningless, from the bottom of my most primitive being, that flow from my belly like honey. A piercing joy, that leaves me empty, conquered, silenced.
It takes courage to push yourself to places you have never been before... to test your limits... to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to stay tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.
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