What I cannot love, I overlook.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Friendship
the personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.
—Anais Nin
Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Living
My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Ideas
The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Love
It takes courage to push yourself to places that you have never been before… to test your limits… to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Action, Self-Discovery, Discovery, Risk, Courage, Growth
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.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Friendship, Love
I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.
—Anais Nin
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.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Women
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish it’s source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of withering, of tarnishing.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Love
Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should reserve it.
—Anais Nin
We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Attitude, Knowledge, Perspective, Perception, Awareness
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.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Life, Self-Discovery
we travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
—Anais Nin
Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.
—Anais Nin
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.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Action
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Ellen DeGeneres American Comedian, Television Host
Joyce Maynard American Novelist
Marguerite Duras French Novelist, Playwright
Sylvia Plath American Poet, Novelist
Henry David Thoreau American Philosopher
Marie Dressler American-Canadian Actress
Rene Dubos French-American Microbiologist, Author
Maya Angelou American Poet
Annie Dillard American Writer
Anne Lamott American Novelist