And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.
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.
He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie.
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.
Dreams are necessary to life.
People living deeply have no fear of death.
I want to do things so wild with you that I don't know how to say them.
Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.
My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of 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.
When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.
There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.
The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.
Longer Version:
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. Most of the writing today which is called fiction contains such a poverty of language, such triteness, that it is a shrunken, diminished world we enter, poorer and more formless than the poorest cripple deprived of ears and eyes and tongue. The writer's responsibility is to increase, develop our senses, expand our vision, heighten our awareness and enrich our articulateness.
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
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.
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.
Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.
How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.
Quotes by Anaïs Nin are featured in:
Courage Quotes
Creativity Quotes
Life Quotes
Time Quotes
Paradise Quotes
Love Quotes
Writing Quotes