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.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Life
There are only two kinds of freedom in the world; the freedom of the rich and powerful, and the freedom of the artist and the monk who renounces possessions
—Anais Nin
Topics: Freedom
To change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard. If one changes internally, one should not continue to live with the same objects. They reflect one’s mind and psyche of yesterday. I throw away what has no dynamic, living use.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Change, Moving on
we travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
—Anais Nin
He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Gift
The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Dreams
Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Action, Conscience
Truth is something which can’t be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Truth
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Danger, Risk
I was thinking of my patients, and how the worst moment for them was when they discovered they were masters of their own fate. It was not a matter of bad or good luck. When they could no longer blame fate, they were in despair.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Fortune, Confidence, Luck
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.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Life, Self-Discovery
I only believe in fire. Life. Fire. Being myself on fire I set others on fire. Never death. Fire and life. Les Jeux.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Belief
Our psychological reality, which lies below the surface, frightens us because it endlessly surprises us and drives us in a direction which society’s rules and organizations define as wrong or dangerous.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Individuality
The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Love
Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Dreams, Action
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.
—Anais Nin
Woman does not forget she needs the fecundator, she does not forget that everything that is born of her is planted in her.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Women
The violence and obscenity are left unadulterated, as manifestation of the mystery and pain which ever accompanies the act of creation.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Pornography, Creation
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Religion, Growth
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.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Planning, Space, Goal, Failure
One must be thrust out of a finished cycle in life, and that leap is the most difficult to make—to part with one’s faith, one’s love, when one would prefer to renew the faith and recreate the passion.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Change, Past, Moving on, Life, Reflection
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.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Growth
the personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.
—Anais Nin
Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Living
People living deeply have no fear of death.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Death, Fear, How to Live, Anxiety, People
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 withering, of tarnishing.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Love
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.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Women
My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Ideas
I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.
—Anais Nin
Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should reserve it.
—Anais Nin
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Isabel Allende Chilean Novelist
- Ellen DeGeneres American Comedian, Television Host
- Joyce Maynard American Novelist
- Marguerite Duras French Novelist, Playwright
- Sylvia Plath American Poet, Novelist
- Henry David Thoreau American Philosopher
- Marie Dressler American-Canadian Actress
- Rene Dubos French-American Microbiologist, Author
- Annie Dillard American Writer
- Maya Angelou American Poet
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