Anais Nin Quotes

Adolescence is like cactus.

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

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.

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.

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

Life, religion and art all converge in Bali. They have no word in their language for 'artist' or 'art.' Everyone is an artist.

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.

Don't let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.

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.

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source.

You cannot save people. You can only love them.

What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements.

When your beauty struck me, it dissolved me. Deep down, I am not different from you. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. I see in you that part of me which is you. I surrender my sincerity because if I love you it means we share the same fantasies, we share the same madness.

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

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

People living deeply have no fear of death.

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 of layers, cells, constellations.

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.

From the backstabbing co-worker to the meddling sister-in-law, you are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.

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

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.

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.

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.

I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits

I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.

Pain is something to master, not to wallow in.

Tranquillity is contagious, peace is contagious. One only thinks of the contagiousness of illness, but there is the contagion of serenity and joy.

Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one's self from enslavement by the earth.

Whenever you do something that is not aligned with the yearning or your soul—you create suffering.

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.

I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.

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.

Good things happen to those who hustle.

You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead.

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

We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them.

If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.

The secret of life was Breath. That was what I always wanted my words to do, to Breathe.

When you possess light within, you see it externally.

Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.

You don't find love, it finds you. It's got a little bit to do with destiny, fate, and what's written in the stars.

For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds, and you and I both lose it in the same way, through love.

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.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection.

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

I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.

I know why families were created with all their imperfections. They humanize you. They are made to make you forget yourself occasionally, so that the beautiful balance of life is not destroyed.

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

We are never trapped unless we choose to be.

Travel is seeking the lost paradise. It is the supreme illusion of love.