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Life Quotes by Anais Nin

134 Life quotes by Anais Nin

All Life quotes Anais Nin’s page

Anais Nin writes that life expands when we act with courage, turning fear into growth. She sees introspection as an active alchemy that can change how we feel, not just a quiet pause. She also believes writing lets us taste life twice—once in the moment and again in memory.

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Dreams are essential to life.

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

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“I want to bite into life, and to be torn by it.”

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People living deeply have no fear of death.

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I seek the real stuff of life. Profound drama.

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Dreams are necessary to life.

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To love and to labor is the sum of living.

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Either one fails in one's art or in one's life.

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Life is a full circle, widening until it joins the circle motions of the infinite.

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You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too.

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Through love, through friendship, a heart lives more than one life.

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“Introspection does not need to be a still life. It can be an active alchemy.”

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

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Keeping a Diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements essential to the vitality of writing.

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The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.

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My life is slowed up by thought and the need to understand what I am living.

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The preoccupation of the novelist: how to capture the living moments, was answered by the diary. You write while you are alive.…

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I know why families were created with all their imperfections. They humanize you. They are made to make you forget yourself occasionally,…

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Life is so fluid that one can only hope to capture the living moment, to capture it alive and fresh ... without…

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Life, religion and art all converge in Bali. They have no word in their language for 'artist' or 'art.' Everyone is an…

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

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The woman will sit eternally in the tall black armchair. I will be the one woman you will never have...excessive living weighs…

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What everyone forgets is that passion is not merely a heightened sensual fusion but a way of life which produces, as in…

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“We are more severe judges of our own acts... We judge our thoughts, our intents, our secret curses, our secret hates, not…

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“She liked the silence most of all. The silence in which the body, the senses, the instincts, are more alert, more powerful,…

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He, who had done more than any human being to draw her out of the caves of her secret, folded life, now…

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We also write to heighten our own awareness of life... We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection...…

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That is my essential reason for writing, not for fame, not to be celebrated after death, but to heighten and create life…

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“It is true that I create over and over again the same difficulties for myself in order to struggle over and over…

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You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you; I wished for your existence. You…

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We three belong to the Middle Ages. We have this need of heroism, and there is no place for such feelings in…

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One always, sooner or later, comes upon a city which is an image of one's inner cities. Fez is an image of…

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“You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there…

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“Since that talk with Henry, when I admitted more than I had ever admitted to myself, my life has altered and become…

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“She could do nothing. Djuna’s words illuminated her chaos, but changed nothing. What was it Djuna said: that life tended to crystallize…

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No one was ever born without that light or flame of life. Some event, some person stifles or drowns it altogether. I…

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Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the…

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“In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living.…

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“Why is that I never get cut off from pity, sympathy, participation, in spite of the fact that I am living out…

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“The secret of a full life is to live and relate to others as if they might not be there tomorrow, as…

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More by Anais Nin

I wanted to remember in order to be able to return.

“…For love it is never the same. What goes on inside is never the same just like this music which changes every instant. For…

Jazz is the music of the body. The breath comes through brass. It is the body's breath, and the strings' wails and moans are…

I have so strong a sense of creation, of tomorrow, that I cannot get drunk, knowing I will be less alive, less well, less…

We don't have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds.

Strange, isn't it, that no chemical will give a human being the iridescence that illusions have given them? Give me your hat.

The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic.

Introspection is a devouring monster. You have to feed it with much material, much experience, many people, many places, many loves, many creations, and…

In each studio there is a human being dressed in the full regalia of his myth fearing to expore a vulnerable opening, spreading not…

I don't mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated

“Laughter and tears are not separate experiences, with intervals of rest: they rush out together and it is like walking with a sword between…

The basis of insincerity is the idealized image we hold of ourselves and wish to impose on others.

I write emotional algebra.

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

I say quotations are literary. They are good only when dealing with ideas, not with experience. Experience should be pure, unique.