Anais Nin Inspirational Quotations

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

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

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

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.

Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.

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.

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.

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

I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.

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.

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.

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

Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.

Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.

The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest.

Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be...including our perception. Of it

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.

A war regarded as inevitable or even probable, and therefore much prepared for, has a very good chance of eventually being fought.

Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.

I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me.

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.

You don't find love, it finds you. It's got a little bit to do with destiny, fate, and what's written in the stars.

I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.

You cannot save people. You can only love them.