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We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it.

— Anaïs Nin Diary entries (1914)

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Life

More quotes by Anaïs Nin

We don't have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds.

Diary entries (1914)

Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one's self from enslavement by the earth.

Sunbeams : A Book of Quotations (1990)

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

Diary entries (1914)

The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.

French Writers of the Past (2000)

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

Diary entries (1914)

All Anaïs Nin quotes →

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To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

Bertrand Russell Marriage and Morals (1929)

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

William James The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)

Reason is Life's sole arbiter, the magic Laby'rinth's single clue:
Worlds lie above, beyond its ken; what crosses it can ne'er be true.

Richard Francis Burton The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870)

It is the law of life that if you are kind to someone you feel happy. If you are cruel you are unhappy. And if you hurt someone, you will be hurt back.

Cary Grant Love – That’s All Cary Grant Ever Thinks About (1964)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Anaïs Nin (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.