Quotes by Anaïs Nin

“The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.”

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

“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 ...”

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

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

“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.”

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

“How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“People living deeply have no fear of death.”

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

“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 becaus...”

“One must be thrust out of a finished cycle in life and that leap is the most difficult to make-to part with one's faith one's love when one would prefer to renew the faith and recreate the passion.”

“To change skins evolve into new cycles I feel one has to learn to discard. If one changes internally one should not continue to live with the same objects. They reflect one's mind and psyche of ...”

“When you make a world tolerable for yourself you make a world tolerable for others.”