Top 380 Anaïs Nin Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “If you can’t create, you destroy.”

— Anaïs Nin

52. “It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar.”

— Anaïs Nin

53. “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

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

— Anaïs Nin

55. “Pain is something to master, not to wallow in.”

— Anaïs Nin

56. “I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically.”

— Anaïs Nin

57. “What is love but acceptance of the other, whatever he is.”

— Anaïs Nin

58. “I hate men who are afraid of women’s strength.”

— Anaïs Nin

59. “I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.”

— Anaïs Nin

60. “The obstacle became his alibi for weakness.”

— Anaïs Nin

61. “Write. Write until it stops hurting.”

— Anaïs Nin

62. “I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.”

— Anaïs Nin

63. “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

64. “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

65. “Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.”

— Anaïs Nin

66. “We are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself.”

— Anaïs Nin

67. “Your eyes make me shy.”

— Anaïs Nin

68. “Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws.”

— Anaïs Nin

69. “When one is pretending, the entire body revolts.”

— Anaïs Nin

70. “I adore the struggle you carry in yourself. I adore your terrifying sincerity.”

— Anaïs Nin

71. “I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.”

— Anaïs Nin

72. “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

73. “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

74. “Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. And then love will come to you, then it comes to you.”

— Anaïs Nin

75. “I want to do things so wild with you that I don’t know how to say them.”

— Anaïs Nin

76. “I wanted to remember in order to be able to return.”

— Anaïs Nin

77. “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

78. “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

79. “I am a winged creature who is too rarely allowed to use its wings. Ecstasies do not occur often enough.”

— Anaïs Nin

80. “Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.”

— Anaïs Nin

81. “When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.”

— Anaïs Nin

82. “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

83. “What I cannot love, I overlook.”

— Anaïs Nin

84. “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

85. “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

86. “Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.”

— Anaïs Nin

87. “Living never wore one so much as the effort not to live.”

— Anaïs Nin

88. “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

89. “Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as indispensable as poetry.”

— Anaïs Nin

90. “We see things the way we are, not the way they are.”

— Anaïs Nin

91. “I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.”

— Anaïs Nin

92. “To write is to descend, to excavate, to go underground.”

— Anaïs Nin

93. “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

94. “The artist is the only one who knows that the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements.”

— Anaïs Nin

95. “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

96. “Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.”

— Anaïs Nin

97. “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

98. “Whenever you do something that is not aligned with the yearning or your soul – you create suffering.”

— Anaïs Nin

99. “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

100. “Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one’s self from enslavement by the earth.”

— Anaïs Nin