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.
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Famous Anais Nin Quotes
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
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. 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
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
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
We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are. Anais Nin
Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age. Anais Nin
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. Anais Nin
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow. Anais Nin
Don’t let one cloud obliterate the whole sky. 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
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. 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
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
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 only transformer and alchemist that turns everything into gold is love. The only magic against death, aging, ordinary life, is love. 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
There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do. 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
Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age. 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
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
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
You cannot save people. You can only love them. 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
Tranquillity is contagious, peace is contagious. One only thinks of the contagiousness of illness, but there is the contagion of serenity and joy. 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
With her eyes alone she could give this response, this absolutely erotic response, as if febrile waves were trembling there, pools of madness something devouring that could lick a man all over like a flame, annihilate him, with a pleasure never known before. Anais Nin
We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are. Anais Nin
I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, 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. 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
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
We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls. Anais Nin
You live out the confusions until they become clear. Anais Nin
People living deeply have no fear of death. 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
The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery. Anais Nin
Pain is something to master, not to wallow in. Anais Nin
Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat. Anais Nin
I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living. Anais Nin
Dreams are necessary to life. 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
There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do. Anais Nin
I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again. Anais Nin
Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it. 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
The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself. Anais Nin
We are never trapped unless we choose to be. Anais Nin
Do not seek the because in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions. Anais Nin
I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically. 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
You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. Anais Nin
My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living. Anais Nin
What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements. Anais Nin
It’s all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all. Anais Nin
The secret of joy is the mastery of pain. Anais Nin
When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others. Anais Nin
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. 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
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. Anais Nin
Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live. Anais Nin
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. Anais Nin
What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship? Anais Nin
We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones. 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
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
The only abnormality is the incapacity to love. 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
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. Anais Nin
People living deeply have no fear of death. 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
Do not seek the because in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions. Anais Nin
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing. 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. A piercing joy, that leaves me empty, conquered, silenced. Anais Nin
I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living. 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
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
If I love you it means we share the same fantasies, the same madnesses. 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
The secret of life was Breath. That was what I always wanted my words to do, to Breathe. Anais Nin
We write to taste life twice in the moment and in retrospection. Anais Nin
I want to do things so wild with you that I don’t know how to say them. 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
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 either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life. Anais Nin
I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern. Anais Nin
Violence is a symptom of impotence. Anais Nin
