quotes from classic

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.

more quotes from Anais Nin

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.

more quotes from Anais Nin

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

more quotes from 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.

more quotes from Anais Nin

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

more quotes from 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 nave or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

more quotes from 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.

more quotes from Anais Nin

If all of us acted in unison as I act individually there would be no wars and no poverty. I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way.

more quotes from Anais Nin

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.

more quotes from Anais Nin

I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.

more quotes from Anais Nin

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

more quotes from 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.

more quotes from Anais Nin

Good things happen to those who hustle.

more quotes from 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.

more quotes from Anais Nin

Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.

more quotes from 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.

more quotes from 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.

more quotes from Anais Nin

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

more quotes from Anais Nin

You went on with your dying. Nothing could stop you. Not your son. Not your daughter Who fed you and made you into a child again.

more quotes from Mark Strand

Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it.

more quotes from Jesse Stuart