Top 10 Anais Nin Quotes
Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.
— 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 naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.
— Anais Nin
I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.
— Anais Nin
We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
— Anais Nin
The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
— Anais Nin
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.
— 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
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.
— Anais Nin
We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.
— 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.
— Anais Nin
Anais Nin Quotes About Life
I watched life and wanted to be a part of it but found it painfully difficult.
— Anais Nin
And then the day came, when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
— Anais Nin
I do not confess any more, I have no remorse, yet am I doing penance for my enjoyments?
— Anais Nin
With a great clap of thunder, and like bitter tears The drops of rain become noisily mixed with those already fallen.
— Anais Nin
I could be healed by the sheer courage of continuing to live. I could heal myself.
— Anais Nin
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
— Anais Nin
I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason.
— Anais Nin
You write while you are alive. You do not preserve them in alcohol until the moment you are ready to write about them.
— Anais Nin
The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.
— Anais Nin
Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn ‘t impress me.
— Anais Nin
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through.
— Anais Nin
I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
— Anais Nin
The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present.
— Anais Nin
How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?
— Anais Nin
Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
— Anais Nin
Life shrinks or expands according to one’s courage.
— Anais Nin
I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me.
— Anais Nin
We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another.
— Anais Nin
Worlds self-made are so full of monsters and demons.
— 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
In reality, those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ‘idea of them.’
— Anais Nin
I hate men who are afraid of women’s strength.
— Anais Nin
We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.
— Anais Nin
Only in the fever of creation could she recreate her own lost life.
— Anais Nin
We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially.
— Anais Nin
Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.
— Anais Nin
I am the most tired woman in the world. I am tired when I get up. Life requires an effort I cannot make.
— Anais Nin
The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
— Anais Nin
The cult of the unconscious as proclaimed by Rimbaud. It is not madness. It is an effort to transcend the rigidities and the patterns made by the rational mind.
— Anais Nin
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.
— Anais Nin
Don’t let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.
— Anais Nin
There are books which we read early in life, which sink into our consciousness and seem to disappear without leaving a trace. And then one day we find, in some summing-up of our life and put attitudes towards experience, that their influence has been enormous.
— Anais Nin
You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating.
— Anais Nin
You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too.
— 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
But society is the one that keeps demanding that we fit in and not disturb things. They would like you to fit in right away so that things work now.
— Anais Nin
I had always believed in Andre Breton’s freedom, to write as one thinks, in the order and disorder in which one feels in thinks, to follow sensations and absurd correlations of events and images, to trust to the new realms they lead one into.
— Anais Nin
What unites us universally is our emotions, our feelings in the face of experience, and not necessarily the actual experiences themselves.
— Anais Nin
Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.
— Anais Nin
My life is not possible to tell. I change every day, change my patterns, my concepts, my interpretations. I am a series of moods and sensations. I play a thousand roles. I weep when I find others play them for me. My real self is unknown. My work is merely an essence of this vast and deep adventure.
— Anais Nin
I am a neurotic – in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.
— Anais Nin
Anais Nin Quotes on Love & Relationships
Do not seek the because—in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.
— Anais Nin
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.
— Anais Nin
Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws.
— Anais Nin
If I love you it means we share the same fantasies, the same madnesses.
— 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.
— Anais Nin
You cannot save people. You can only love them.
— Anais Nin
Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.
— Anais Nin
I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often.
— Anais Nin
The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest.
— Anais Nin
I hate men who are afraid of women’s strength.
— Anais Nin
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.
— Anais Nin
In reality, those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my idea of them.
— Anais Nin
I am lonely, yet not everybody will do.
— Anais Nin
Our love of each other was like two long shadows kissing without hope of reality.
— Anais Nin
There is a resemblance between men and women, not a contrast. When a man begins to recognize his feeling, the two unite. When men accept the sensitive side of themselves, they come alive.
— Anais Nin
I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness.
— Anais Nin
The love of only one man or one woman is an enclosure.
— Anais Nin
He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.
— Anais Nin
Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.
— Anais Nin
I want to love you wildly. I don’t want words, but inarticulate cries, meaningless, from the bottom of my most primitive being, that flow from my belly like honey.
— Anais Nin
Someday I’ll be locked up for love insanity. ‘She loved too much!’
— Anais Nin
You should not love me. One ought not to love the moon. If you come too near me, I will hurt you.
— Anais Nin
We speak of the masculine and the feminine, but they are the wrong labels. It is really more a matter of poetry versus intellectualization.
— Anais Nin
Love is the axis and breath of my life. The art I produce is a byproduct, an excrescence of love, the song I sing, the joy which must explode, the overabundance — that is all!
— Anais Nin
Oh, God, I know no joy as great as a moment of rushing into a new love, no ecstasy like that of a new love.
— Anais Nin
Anais Nin Quotes About Friendship
I only regret that everybody wants to deprive me of the journal, which is the only steadfast friend I have, the only one which makes my life bearable…
— Anais Nin
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.
— Anais Nin
Anais Nin Quotes to Inspire Deeper Living
I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.
— Anais Nin
The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.
— Anais Nin
I want to make my own discoveries… penetrate the evil which attracts me.
— Anais Nin
Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.
— Anais Nin
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.
— Anais Nin
Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.
— 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
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
— Anais Nin
I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.
— Anais Nin
To hell, to hell with balance! I break glasses; I want to burn, even if I break myself. I want to live only for ecstasy. I’m neurotic, perverted, destructive, fiery, dangerous – lava, inflammable, unrestrained.
— Anais Nin
Passion gives me moments of wholeness.
— Anais Nin
Dreams are necessary to life.
— Anais Nin
I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it.
— Anais Nin
When one is pretending, the entire body revolts.
— Anais Nin
Life is a full circle, widening until it joins the circle motions of the infinite.
— Anais Nin
I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.
— Anais Nin
We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art ― we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.
— Anais Nin
I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.
— Anais Nin
When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.
— Anais Nin
Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity, and stumble from defeat to defeat.
— Anais Nin
More Best Anais Nin Quotes
Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.
— Anais Nin
Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.
— 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
I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.
— Anais Nin
My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.
— Anais Nin
The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.
— Anais Nin
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
— 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
We write to taste life twice: in the moment and in retrospection.
— Anais Nin
It’s all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all.
— 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
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.
— Anais Nin
People living deeply have no fear of death.
— 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
A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked.
— Anais Nin
What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?
— 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
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.
— Anais Nin
Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.
— 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
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.
— Anais Nin
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.
— Anais Nin
