Explore Quotes by Anais Nin

If all of us acted in unison as I act individually there would be no wars and no poverty. I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way.

What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?

I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.

Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.

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

When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.

Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.

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.

There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.

The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.

I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.

It's all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all.

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

People living deeply have no fear of death.

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.

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.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

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.

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.