Anais Nin Quotes

“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.”

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

“You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too.”

“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.”

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

“Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.”

“The complaints of the child in us will never cease lamenting until it is consoled, answered, understood. Only then will it lie still in us, like our fears. It will die in peace and leave us what the child leaves to the man – the sense of wonder.”

“If a person continues to see only giants, it means he is still seeing the world through the eyes of a child.”

“Anxiety is love’s greatest killer, because it is like the stranglehold of the drowning.”

“Don’t let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.”

“We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

“When one is pretending, the entire body revolts.”

“We are all engaged in the task of peeling off the false selves, the programmed selves, the selves created by our families, our culture, our religions.”

“People living deeply have no fear of death.”

“Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.”

“The child who is uprooted begins to recognize that what he builds within himself is what will endure, what will withstand shattering experiences.”

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

“It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar.”

“One discovers that destiny can be diverted, that one does not have to remain in bondage to the first wax imprint made on childhood sensibilities. Once the deforming mirror has been smashed, there is a possibility of wholeness. There is a possibility of joy.”

“You cannot save people. You can only love them.”

“Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.”

“Don’t wait for it. Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. Create. And then the love will come to you, then it comes to you.”

“Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws.”

“Compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity.”

“The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.”

“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.”

“Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.”

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

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”