Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) was a renowned French-American writer and diarist. She is best known for her diaries, which provide an intimate and candid glimpse into her personal life, relationships, and creative journey. Read some of the best Anais Nin quotes and sayings that inspire you about love and life.
Her literary career began with her journals, which she started keeping at the age of eleven. Nin’s diaries span several decades and encompass more than 35,000 pages of writing.
They offer deep insights into her emotional and psychological experiences, as well as reflections on her relationships with notable figures from the literary and artistic world, such as Henry Miller, June Miller, and others.
Top 10 Anais Nin Quotes
- “In chaos, there is fertility.” — Anais Nin
- “The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.” — Anais Nin
quotes by anais nin - “Good things happen to those who hustle.” — Anais Nin
anaïs nin quotes - “When one is pretending, the entire body revolts.” — Anais Nin
- “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” — Anais Nin
anais nin quotes - “Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.” — Anais Nin
- “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” — Anais Nin
anais nin quotes life - “Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.” — Anais Nin
- “Whenever you do something that is not aligned with the yearning or your soul—you create suffering.” — Anais Nin
- “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” — Anais Nin
Best Quotes By Anais Nin
- “To lie, of course, is to engender insanity.” — Anais Nin
- “Passion gives me moments of wholeness.” — Anais Nin
- “I hate men who are afraid of women’s strength.” — Anais Nin
- “Worlds self-made are so full of monsters and demons.” — Anais Nin
- “Only in the fever of creation could she recreate her own lost life.” — Anais Nin
- “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.” — 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
- “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
- “In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude.” — Anais Nin
- “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.” — Anais Nin
Famous Quotes Of Anais Nin
- “I am lonely, yet not everybody will do.” — Anais Nin
- “Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.” — Anais Nin
- “It’s all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all.” — Anaïs Nin
- “I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.” — 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
- “In reality, those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my idea of them.” — Anaïs Nin
- “There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.” — Anais Nin
- “The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.” — 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
- “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
Anais Nin Quotes On Love
- “The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.” — Anais Nin
- “You cannot save people. You can only love them.” — Anais Nin
- “Only the united beat of se and heart together can create ecstasy.” — Anais Nin
- “If I love you it means we share the same fantasies, the same madnesses.” — Anais Nin
- “Our love of each other was like two long shadows kissing without hope of reality.” — Anais Nin
- “Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.” — 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
- “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
- “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
- “Since desire always goes towards that which is our direct opposite, it forces us to love that which will make us suffer.” — 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
- “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
- “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
anais nin love quotes
Anais Nin Quotes About Life
- “Dreams are necessary to life.” — Anais Nin
- “People living deeply have no fear of death.” — Anais Nin
- “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” — Anais Nin
- “The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.” — Anais Nin
- “Life is a full circle, widening until it joins the circle motions of the infinite.” — Anais Nin
- “I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.” — Anais Nin
- “I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.” — 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
- “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
- “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.” — Anais Nin
Deep Quotes By Anais Nin
- “Analysis is for those who are paralyzed by life.” — Anais Nin
- “I want to make my own discoveries… penetrate the evil which attracts me.” — Anais Nin
- “Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.” — 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
- “The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison, was the miracle.” — Anais Nin
- “I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.” — 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 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.” — Anais Nin
- “Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another.” — Anais Nin
Inspirational Anais Nin Quotes
- “Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.” — Anais Nin
- “Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.” — Anais Nin
- “Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.” — Anais Nin
- “Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.” — Anais Nin
- “I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.” — Anais Nin
- “We are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself.” — Anais Nin
- “When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.” — Anais Nin
- “The enemy of a love is never outside, it’s not a man or a woman, it’s what we lack in ourselves.” — 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
- “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.” — 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
- “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.” — Anais Nin
- “Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.” — 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
- “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
More About Anaïs Nin’s Life
Born in Neuilly, France, Anaïs Nin moved to the United States with her family at a young age and eventually became a naturalized American citizen.
Anais Nin wrote in multiple genres, including fiction, essays, and poetry. Her works often explored themes of human relationships, seuality, and self-discovery.
Some of her most famous books include “Delta of Venus,” “Little Birds,” and “The Diary of Anaïs Nin.”
She remains an iconic figure in literature, admired for her honesty, introspection, and unique approach to exploring human emotions and relationships through her writing.
Keep these inspirational quotes bookmarked on your phone or computer to pull your spirits up and scroll through whenever you need a little pick me up.
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