Angela Anais Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell, known professionally as Anaïs Nin was a French-Cuban American diarist, essayist, novelist, and writer of short stories. Profoundly inspirational Anais Nin quotes will make you look at life differently and help you live a meaningful life.
If you’re searching for deep quotes by authors that perfectly capture what you’d like to say or just want to feel inspired yourself, browse through an amazing collection of profound Anne Lamott quotes, amazing Audre Lorde quotes and top Bell Hooks quotes.
Famous Anais Nin Quotes
Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension. But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this, I feel I am not living.
You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead.
Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through.
I was stirred only like a leaf in the wind, that is all. . .
Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. And then love will come to you, then it comes to you.
The creative personality never remains fixed on the first world it discovers. It never resigns itself to anything.
the best way to remember a beautiful city or a beautiful painting is to eat something while you are looking at it. The flavor really helps the image to penetrate the body. It fixes it as lacquer does a drawing.
The suppression of inner patterns in favor of patterns created by society is dangerous to us.
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
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.
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.
One handles truths like dynamite.
Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.
The earth is heavy and opaque without dreams.
It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar.
Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.
We are never trapped unless we choose to be.
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.
If I fall asleep, it is because I am overloaded. I sleep because one hour with Henry contains five years of my life, and one phrase, one caress answers the expectations of a hundred nights. When I hear him laugh, I say, I have heard Rabelais… And I swallow his laughter like bread and wine.
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.
You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing.
Inspirational Anais Nin Quotes
There are only two kinds of freedom in the world; the freedom of the rich and powerful, and the freedom of the artist and the monk who renounces possessions.
The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer. The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter, a talk on the street, a book, a phrase learned.
The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy.
The enemy of a love is never outside, it’s not a man or woman, it’s what we lack in ourselves.
Love men and women not for their strength but their softness, not for their fullness but their hunger, not for their plenty but their need.
A war regarded as inevitable or even probable, and therefore much prepared for, has a very good chance of eventually being fought.
We are all engaged in the task of peeling off the false selves, the programmed selves, the selves created by our families, our culture, our religions. It is an enormous task because the history of women has been as incompletely told as the history of blacks.
I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman.
What everyone forgets is that passion is not merely a heightened sensual fusion but a way of life which produces, as in the mystics, an ecstatic awareness of the whole of life.
It is possible I never learned the names of birds in order to discover the bird of peace, the bird of paradise, the bird of the soul, the bird of desire. It is possible I avoided learning the names of composers and their music the better to close my eyes and listen to the mystery of all music as an ocean. It may be I have not learned dates in history in order to reach the essence of timelessness. It may be I never learned geography the better to map my own routes and discover my own lands. The unknown was my compass. The unknown was my encyclopedia. The unnamed was my science and progress.
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.
I have this weird obsession about buying books and looking at them with a smile, even if I won’t read them soon. At least they are mine now.
Human beings can reach such desperate solitude that they may cross a boundary beyond which words cannot serve, and at such moments there is nothing left for them but to bark.
You cannot save people. You can only love them.
Experience teaches acceptance of the imperfect as life.
I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often.
The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life. Albert Einstein 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.
All of my creation is an effort to weave a web of connection with the world: I am always weaving it because it was once broken.
Because history is only an aggregate of personal hostilities, personal prejudices, personal blindness and irrationality, there are times when we have to live against it.
The Frenchman, by nature, is sensuous and sensitive. He has intelligence, which makes him tired of life sooner than other kinds of men. He is not athletic: he sees the futility of the pursuit of fame; the climate at times depresses him.
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.
Nature forms us for ourselves, not for others; to be, not to seem.
We love best those who are, or act for us, a self we do not wish to be or act out.
He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie.
We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made of layers, cells, constellations.
I walk ahead of myself in perpetual expectancy of miracles.
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.
Dreams are essential to life.
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
Top Anais Nin Quotes
To change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard. If one changes internally one should not continue to live with the same objects. They reflect one’s mind and psyche of yesterday. I throw away what has no dynamic, living use.
We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.
The imagination is far better at inventing tortures than life because the imagination is a demon within us and it knows where to strike, where it hurts. It knows the vulnerable spot, and life does not, our friends and lovers do not, because seldom do they have the imagination equal to the task.
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.
Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.
No one was ever born without that light or flame of life. Some event, some person stifles or drowns it altogether. I was always tempted to resuscitate such men by my own joyousness or luminosity.When I break glasses in a night club, as the Russians do, when my unconscious breaks out in wild rebellions, it is against life which has crippled these idealistic, romantic men. I respect these men, cold, pure, faithful, devoted, moral, delicate, sensitive, and unequal to life, more than I respect the tough-minded ones who return three blows to one received, who kill those who hurt them.
Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.
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.
You live out the confusions until they become clear.
We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.
We have been poisoned by fairy tales.
When you possess light within, you see it externally.
I am like a snake who has already bitten. I retreat from a direct battle while knowing the slow effect of the poison.
In my childhood diary I wrote: I have decided that it is better not to love anyone, because when you love people, then you have to be separated from them, and that hurts too much.
The real wonders of life lie in the depths. Exploring the depths for truths is the real wonder which the child and the artist know: magic and power lie in truth.
Compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity.
I don’t tell the truth any more to those who can’t make use of it. I tell it mostly to myself, because it always changes me.
You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too.
I walked into my own book, seeking peace. It was night, and I made a careless movement inside the dream; I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself against my madness.
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. A piercing joy, that leaves me empty, conquered, silenced.
Your eyes make me shy.
I want to hear raucous music, to see faces, to brush against bodies, to drink fiery Benedictine. Beautiful women and handsome men arouse fierce desires in me. I want to dance. I want drugs. I want to know perverse people, to be intimate with them. I never look at naive faces. I want to bite into life, and to be torn by it.
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.
I would like to have your sureness. I am waiting for love, the core of a woman’s life. Don’t wait for it, I said. Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. And then love will come to you, then it comes to you. It was only when I wrote my first book that the world I wanted to live in opened to me.
Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.
We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection.
Poetry, which is our relation to the senses, enables us to retain a living relationship to all things. It is the quickest means of transportation to reach dimensions above or beyond the traps set by the so-called realists. It is a way to learn levitation and travel in liberated continents, to travel by moonlight as well as sunlight.
The fiery moments of passionate experience are the moments of wholeness and totality of the personality.
The self is merely the lens through which we see others and the world.
What is love but acceptance of the other, whatever he is.
Life is a full circle, widening until it joins the circle motions of the infinite.
Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one’s self from enslavement by the earth.
It takes courage to push yourself to places you have never been before, to test your limits, to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to stay tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
I know why families were created with all their imperfections. They humanize you. They are made to make you forget yourself occasionally, so that the beautiful balance of life is not destroyed.
