Anaïs Nin was a famous French-born author who is known for her personal diaries.
Nin was influenced by the Surrealist movement and her study of psychoanalysis under Otto Rank.
Her literary career took off with the publication of “D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study” in 1932, which sparked a lifelong friendship with American author Henry Miller.
Despite a lack of initial critical acclaim, her works found admirers among key literary figures of her time.
She gained significant recognition as a writer only after the first volume of her diaries was published in 1966.
Nin’s work, including her unique expression of femininity, lyrical style and psychological insight, have been both admired and criticized.
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Posthumous publications of erotic stories she wrote during the early 1940s added to the controversy surrounding her literary contribution.
I have chosen the best quotes from Anaïs Nin for you.
Inspiring Anaïs Nin Quotes
1. “You fall in love with people’s minds.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
2. “The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
3. “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
4. “Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
5. “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
6. “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
7. “You cannot save people. You can only love them.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
8. “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).
9. “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.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
10. “Good things happen to those who hustle.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
11. “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
12. “People living deeply have no fear of death.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
13. “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.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
14. “I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
15. “Ordinary life does not interest me.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
16. “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.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
17. “Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
18. “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.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
19. “How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
20. “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.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
Popular Anaïs Nin Quotes
21. “Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
22. “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
23. “I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
24. “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.” Anaïs Nin
25. “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).
26. “The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
27. “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.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
28. “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 naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
29. “The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
30. “We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art – we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
31. “The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
32. “Dreams are necessary to life.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
33. “In chaos, there is fertility.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
34. “Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
35. “We don’t have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
Top Anaïs Nin Quotes
36. “We have been poisoned by fairy tales.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
37. “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.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
38. “When your beauty struck me, it dissolved me. Deep down, I am not different from you. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. I see in you that part of me which is you. I surrender my sincerity because if I love you it means we share the same fantasies, we share the same madness.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
39. “Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
40. “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.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
41. “Passion gives me moments of wholeness.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
42. “Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
43. “I’m awaiting a lover. I have to be rent and pulled apart and live according to the demons and the imagination in me. I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
44. “I write emotional algebra.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
45. “You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you; I wished for your existence. You will always be a part of my life. If I love you, it must be because we shared, at some moment, the same imaginings, the same madness, the same stage.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
46. “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.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
47. “I can’t let you go now. I want to go places with you; obscure little places, just to be able to say: here I came with her.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
48. “I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
49. “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.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
50. “I hate men who are afraid of women’s strength.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
51. “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).
52. “There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
53. “Pain is something to master, not to wallow in.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
Famous Anaïs Nin Quotes
54. “The obstacle became his alibi for weakness.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
55. “What is love but acceptance of the other, whatever he is.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
56. “Write. Write until it stops hurting.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
57. “It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
58. “If you can’t create, you destroy.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
59. “I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
60. “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.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
61. “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).
62. “Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
63. “Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
64. “When you possess light within, you see it externally.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
65. “I adore the struggle you carry in yourself. I adore your terrifying sincerity.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
66. “I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
67. “I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
68. “Your eyes make me shy.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
Short Anaïs Nin Quotes
69. “We are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
70. “When one is pretending, the entire body revolts.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
71. “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.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
72. “I either eat too much or starve myself. Sleep for 14 hours or have insomniac nights. Fall in love very hard or hate passionately. I don’t know what grey is. I never did.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
73. “Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
74. “I am a winged creature who is too rarely allowed to use its wings. Ecstasies do not occur often enough.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
75. “To write is to descend, to excavate, to go underground.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
76. “When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
77. “I want to do things so wild with you that I don’t know how to say them.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
78. “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.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
79. “Living never wore one so much as the effort not to live.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
80. “Only when the poet and the scientist work in unison will we have living experiences and knowledge of the marvels of the universe as they are being discovered.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
81. “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.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
82. “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).
83. “Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
84. “I despise my own hypersensitiveness, which requires so much reassurance. It is certainly abnormal to crave so much to be loved and understood.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
85. “I am like a snake who has already bitten. I retreat from a direct battle while knowing the slow effect of the poison.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
86. “The value of the personal relationship to all things is that it creates intimacy and intimacy creates understanding and understanding creates love.” ~ (Anais Nin).
Best Anaïs Nin Quotes
87. “Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.” ~ (Anais Nin).
88. “I wanted to remember in order to be able to return.” ~ (Anais Nin).
89. “Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as indispensable as poetry.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
90. “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 over me like rain, gather it up with lace and silk, and press it over myself again.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
91. “I prefer by far the warmth and softness to mere brilliancy and coldness. Some people remind me of sharp 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).
92. “The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison, was the miracle.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
93. “Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one’s self from enslavement by the earth.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
94. “I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
95. “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.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
96. “I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
97. “I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my idea of them.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
98. “He, who had done more than any human being to draw her out of the caves of her secret, folded life, now threw her down into deeper recesses of fear and doubt. The fall was greater than she had ever known, because she had ventured so far into emotion and had abandoned herself to it.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
99. “She walked in the shadow of Rango with a great feeling of being taken out of herself, of having no knowledge of what was happening to her, merely a pervading sense of flow.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
100. “To lie, of course, is to engender insanity.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
101. “What I cannot love, I overlook.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
102. “This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
103. “The man who was once starved may revenge himself upon the world not by stealing just once, or by stealing only what he needs, but by taking from the world an endless toll in payment of something irreplaceable, which is the lost faith.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
104. “Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
105. “The love of only one man or one woman is an enclosure.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
106. “He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
107. “Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. And then love will come to you, then it comes to you.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
108. “Don’t let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
109. “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.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
110. “Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.” ~ (Anaïs Nin).
