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

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

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

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 witherings, of tarnishings.
Anais Nin

My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.
Anais Nin

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

People living deeply have no fear of death.
Anais Nin

The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.
Anais Nin

The human father has to be confronted and recognized as human, as man who created a child and then, by his absence, left the child fatherless and then Godless.
Anais Nin

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
Anais Nin

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.
Anais Nin

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
Anais Nin

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.
Anais Nin

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

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
Anais Nin

There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Anais Nin

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.
Anais Nin

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.
Anais Nin

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

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