Quotes by Anais Nin

“If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.”

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

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection”

“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 one is pretending the entire body revolts”

“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.”

“The violence and obscenity are left unadulterated, as manifestation of the mystery and pain which ever accompanies the act of creation.”

“She lacks confidence, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not care to be herself.”

“What I cannot love, I overlook”

“Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.”

“Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.”

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

“Dreams are necessary to life.”

“He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie.”

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

“There are only two kinds of freedom in the world; the freedom of the rich and powerful, and the freedom of the artist and the monk who renounces possessions”

“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...”

“From the backstabbing co-worker to the meddling sister-in-law, you are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.”

There were always in me two women at least one woman desperate and bewildered who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene as upon a stage conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses helplessness despair and present to the world only a smile an eagerness curiosity enthusiasm interest.