Anais Nin Quotes

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

Poetry is the alchemy which teaches us to convert ordinary materials into gold.

Mature people relate to each other without the need to merge.

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 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.

Balance is not to be sought by association with others; it must exist within one’s self.

Anais Nin

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

Don’t let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.

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.

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

You cannot save people. You can only love them.

Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go.

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.

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

There is a fissure in my vision and madness will always rush through.

The real wonders of life lie in the depths. Exploring the depths for truths is the real wonder which the child and the artist know: magic and power lie in truth.

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

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.

“We see the world as ‘we’ are, not as ‘it’ is; because it is the “I” behind the ‘eye’ that does the seeing.”

When you possess light within, you see it externally.

In chaos, there is fertility.

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

Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.

You are the only woman who ever answered the demands of my imagination.

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.