When you possess light within, you see it externally.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Light
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
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.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Anxiety
I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Risk
we travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
—Anais Nin
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
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: Goal, Space, Planning, Failure
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
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Growth, Religion
Jazz is the music of the body.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Jazz
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
What I cannot love, I overlook.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Friendship
Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Explanation
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
We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Awareness, Perception, Knowledge, Attitude, Perspective
Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should reserve it.
—Anais Nin
The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Love
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, Moving on, Reflection, Life, Past
I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.
—Anais Nin
People living deeply have no fear of death.
—Anais Nin
Topics: How to Live, Fear, Anxiety, People, Death
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…
—Anais Nin
Topics: Excitement, Joy
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
It takes courage to push yourself to places that you have never been before… to test your limits… to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Self-Discovery, Risk, Courage, Discovery, Pain, Action, Growth
Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Living
I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Family, Father, Fathers
I cannot concentrate all my friendship on any single one of my friends because no one is complete enough in himself.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Friendship
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 withering, of tarnishing.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Love
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
Electric flesh-arrows… traversing the body. A rainbow of color strikes the eyelids. A foam of music falls over the ears. It is the gong of the orgasm.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Sex
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
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 Canadian-American Actress
- Rene Dubos French Microbiologist, Chemist
- Annie Dillard American Writer
- Maya Angelou American Poet
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