Anaïs Nin Quotes

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

Anxiety is love`s greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.

Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.

Dreams are necessary to life.

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.

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

My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.

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.

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

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.

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 shrinks or expands in proportion to one`s courage.

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.

Anxiety is love`s greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.

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

We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them.

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 naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

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

We don`t see things as they are, we see things as we are.

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.

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.

Dreams are necessary to life.

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.

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

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

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don`t write, because our culture has no use for it.

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

People living deeply have no fear of death.