"Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.
More Anaïs Nin quotes
"Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.
"All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished.
"Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.
"You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out...
"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
"We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We a...
"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.
"Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.
"We are more severe judges of our own acts... We judge our thoughts, our intents, our secret curses, our secret hates, not only our acts.
"In our twenties we have conflicts. We think everything is either-or, black or white: we are caught between them and we lose all our energy in the conf...
"No one was ever born without that light or flame of life. Some event, some person stifles or drowns it altogether. I was always tempted to resuscitate...
"I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more,...
"I never lose sight of the whole. An impeccable dress is made to be lived in, to be torn, wet, stained, crumpled.
"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 echoes of the body’s musi...