1. Whenever you do something that is not aligned with the yearning or your soul—you create suffering.

2. If you limit yourself only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is compromise.

3. The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.

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

5. I know why families were created, with all their imperfections. They humanize you. They are made to make you forget yourself occasionally, so that the beautiful balance of life is not destroyed.

6. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.

7. When one is pretending, the entire body revolts.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison, was the miracle.

11. It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar.

12. Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.

13. The enemy of a love is never outside, it’s not a man or a woman, it’s what we lack in ourselves.

- A Spy in the House of Love

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

15. What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered.

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

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

18. 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.

19. One word I would banish from the dictionary is ‘escape.’ Just banish that and you’ll be fine. Because that word has been misused regarding anybody who wanted to move away from a certain spot and wanted to grow.

20. When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.

21. 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.

22. Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.

23. I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

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

25. My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts, my appearance, my talents, my flaws and to stop this incessant worrying that I can’t be loved as I am.

26. We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art–we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.

- In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays

27. Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.

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

29. You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating.

30. I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.

31. Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.

- Henry and June

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

33. I write emotional algebra.

34. Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.

35. Our love of each other was like two long shadows kissing without hope of reality.

36. I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often.

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

38. There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don’t work.

39. 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.

40. She lacks confidence, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not dare to be herself.

41. 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, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits.

42. Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously.

43. I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.

44. In chaos, there is fertility.

45. I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.

46. When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.

47. We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.

48. I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ.

49. Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

- The Diary of Anais Nin

50. Stories do not end.

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

52. If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.

53. For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds, and you and I both lose it in the same way, through love.

- Fire: From A Journal of Love

54. 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.

55. Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.

56. To think of him in the middle of the day lifts me out of ordinary living.

57. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.

58. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.

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

60. 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.

61. I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness.

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

63. He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.

64. Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.

- Delta of Venus

65. If a person continues to see giants, it means he is still looking at the world through the eyes of a child.

66. Passion gives me moments of wholeness.

67. The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

68. When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.

69. Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.

70. Introspection is a devouring monster. You have to feed it with much material, much experience, many people, many places, many loves, many creations, and then it ceases feeding on you.

71. Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.

72. 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 na?ve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.