Top 380 Anaïs Nin Quotes (2023 Update)

1. “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”

— Anaïs Nin

Featured in: Courage Quotes, Life Quotes, Motivational Bodybuilding Quotes, Inspiring Quotes

2. “We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

— Anaïs Nin

Featured in: Attitude Quotes

3. “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

4. “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

Featured in: Friendship Quotes

5. “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”

— Anaïs Nin

Featured in: Quotes About Writing

6. “The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”

— Anaïs Nin

Featured in: Quotes About Writing

7. “You cannot save people. You can only love them.”

— Anaïs Nin

8. “Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.”

— Anaïs Nin

Featured in: Music Quotes

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

Featured in: Worry Quotes

10. “I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.”

— Anaïs Nin

11. “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

12. “Good things happen to those who hustle.”

— Anaïs Nin

13. “People living deeply have no fear of death.”

— Anaïs Nin

14. “You fall in love with people’s minds.”

— Anaïs Nin

15. “Ordinary life does not interest me.”

— Anaïs Nin

16. “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

17. “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

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. “Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.”

— Anaïs Nin

20. “Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.”

— Anaïs Nin

21. “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

22. “The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.”

— Anaïs Nin

23. “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”

— Anaïs Nin

24. “I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.”

— Anaïs Nin

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art – we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.”

— Anaïs Nin

29. “Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.”

— Anaïs Nin

30. “Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.”

— Anaïs Nin

31. “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

32. “The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.”

— Anaïs Nin

33. “We don't have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds.”

— Anaïs Nin

34. “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

35. “Dreams are necessary to life.”

— Anaïs Nin

36. “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

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. “The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.”

— Anaïs Nin

39. “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

40. “We have been poisoned by fairy tales.”

— Anaïs Nin

41. “In chaos, there is fertility.”

— 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. “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

44. “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

45. “Passion gives me moments of wholeness.”

— Anaïs Nin

46. “I write emotional algebra.”

— Anaïs Nin

47. “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

48. “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

49. “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

50. “There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.”

— Anaïs Nin