Few people have captured the human experience quite like Anaïs Nin. A prolific writer and thinker, her quotes on topics ranging from love and desire to growth and change are as insightful as they are beautiful.
Motivational Anaïs Nin Quotes
- You cannot save people. You can only love them.
- Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.
- We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.
- I hate men who are afraid of women’s strength.
- I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
- The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say but what we are unable to communicate.
- Life is a full circle, widening until it joins the circle motions of the infinite.
- Our love of each other was like two long shadows kissing without hope of reality.
- 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 give negativity power over your life or choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is essential in your life. Those who cannot live entirely often become destroyers of life.” Anaïs Nin
- Luxury is not necessary, but beautiful and good things are. And the day came when the risk of remaining tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
- We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We sometimes grow in one dimension and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm and 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.”Anaïs Nin
- People living deeply have no fear of death. The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
- Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a centre. So we lost our centre and have to find it again.”Anaïs Nin
- Whenever you do something not aligned with the yearning of your soul—you create suffering.
- The personal life intensely lived always expands into truths beyond itself. In the chaos, there is fertility.
- We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, lives, and souls. Suppose you limit yourself only to what seems possible or reasonable. In that case, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is compromise.
Famous Anaïs Nin Quotes
If you’re looking for words of wisdom from one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century, then look no further than Anaïs Nin. Born in 1903 in France, Nin was a novelist, essayist, and diarist who spent much of her adult life in the United States. She was known for her unconventional lifestyle and her many love affairs, both platonic and erotic.
Nin was also known for her sharp wit and disarmingly honest way of looking at the world. In her writing, she often explored themes of gender, sexuality, and self-acceptance. Her work has profoundly affected generations of readers, and her quotes are just as powerful today as they were when she first wrote them.
- My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts, appearance, talents, and flaws and stop this incessant worrying that I can’t be loved as I am.” Anaïs Nin
- I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, makes enormous demands on me, does not doubt my courage or my toughness, does not believe me naive or innocent, dares to treat me like a woman.”Anaïs Nin
- Do not seek the because—in love, there is no because, reason, explanation, or solution. You don’t find love. It finds you. It’s got a little to do with destiny, fate, and what’s written in the stars.
- Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws. If I love you, it means we share the same fantasies and madnesses.
- How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants rather than to create it herself.
- 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.”Anaïs Nin
- Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy. I reserve the right to love many different people and change my prince often.
- Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age. The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest.
- 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 panic.”Anaïs Nin
- In reality, those who satisfy me simply allow me to live with my idea of them.
- There is not one significant cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual sense, an individual plot, like a particular novel, a book for each person.” Anaïs Nin
- It’s all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman, first of all. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
- Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. 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.
- I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically and musically, in whom feelings are much stronger than reason. I am so thirsty for the marvellous that only the magnificent have power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvellous, 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.”Anaïs Nin
- I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living. Each friend represents a world in us, possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
- Good things happen to those who hustle. 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.
- Our life is composed extensively of dreams from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.
- I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me. The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.
- I want to make my own discoveries… penetrate the evil which attracts me. Creation that cannot express itself becomes madness.
- I don’t really want to become normal, average, or standard. I wish to gain strength and the courage to live my life more fully, enjoy myself more, and experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits.”Anaïs Nin
- Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it. There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.
- I postpone death by living, suffering, error, risk, giving, and losing. I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, which I can only escape by writing.
- To hell, to hell with balance! I break glasses; I want to burn, even if I hurt myself. I want to live only for ecstasy. I’m neurotic, perverted, destructive, fiery, dangerous – lava, inflammable, unrestrained.”Anaïs Nin
- Passion gives me moments of wholeness. Dreams are necessary to live.
- I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it. When one is pretending, the entire body revolts.
- 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.” Anaïs Nin
- We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art ― we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.
- I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again. When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a globe bearable for others. Life is indeed known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity, and stumble from defeat to defeat.
- Someone told me the delightful story of the crusader who put a chastity belt on his wife and gave the key to his best friend for safekeeping in case of his death. He had ridden only a few miles away when his friend, riding hard, caught up with him, saying, ‘You gave me the wrong key!”Anaïs Nin
- 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. I would have died in other people’s if I had not created my whole world. The analysis is for those who are paralyzed by life. When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, or a literary dogma, we become automatons. Societies in decline have no use for visionaries. I made no resolutions for the New Year. Making plans, criticizing, sanctioning and moulding my life is too much of a daily event for me.
- In my childhood diary, I wrote: I have decided that it is better not to love anyone because when you love people, you have to be separated from them, which hurts too much.”Anaïs Nin
- Since desire always goes towards that which is our direct opposite, it forces us to love that which will make us suffer. Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself. I’m sick of my own romanticism. I am like a snake that has already been bitten. I retreat from a direct battle while knowing the slow effect of the poison.
- Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again, and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.” Anaïs Nin
- Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we must go through. Where people fail is when they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death. Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, and instabilities, and it always balances them. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.
- It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with, we cease to see. The writer shakes up the typical scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.” Anaïs Nin
- We are going to the moon, which is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself. 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. When others asked me the truth, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted but an illusion they could bear to live with. Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvellous.
- What can I do with my happiness? How can I keep it, conceal it, bury it where I may never lose it? I want to kneel as it falls like rain, gather it with lace and silk, and press it over myself again.” Anaïs Nin
- Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together. The enemy of love is never outside. It’s not a man or a woman. It’s what we lack in ourselves. Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I rarely hate, though when I hate, I hate murderously.
- 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.” Anaïs Nin
- This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice. The dream was always running ahead of me. The miracle was to catch up and live for a moment in unison.
- I prefer by far the warmth and softness to mere brilliance and coldness. Some people remind me of brilliant, dazzling diamonds. Valuable but lifeless and loveless. Others, of the simplest field flowers, with hearts full of dew and with all the tints of celestial beauty reflected in their modest petals.“ Anaïs Nin
- The monster I kill every day is the monster of realism. The beast who attacks me every day is destruction. Out of the duel comes the transformation. I turn defeat into creation over and over again.” Anaïs Nin
- If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know joy. I am possessed by madness for knowledge, experience, and creation.” Anaïs 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.” Anaïs Nin
- I disregard the proportions, the measures, and the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the everyday world as an ordinary woman. To enter superficial relationships. I want ecstasy. I am neurotic — in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am changed to myself.” Anaïs Nin
- When your beauty struck me, it dissolved me. Deep down, I am not different from you. I dreamed of you. I wished for your existence. I see in you that part of me that is you. I surrender my sincerity because we share the same fantasies if I love you. We share the same madness.” Anaïs Nin
- The body is an instrument that only gives off music when used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, sensuality traverses the body and reaches ecstasy.” Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin quotes many things, including growth, love, friends, life, change, desire, and courage.
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