Top 380 Anaïs Nin Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison, was the miracle.”

— Anaïs Nin

102. “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

103. “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

104. “To lie, of course, is to engender insanity.”

— Anaïs Nin

105. “Each friend represents a world in us.”

— Anaïs Nin

106. “Our psychological reality, which lies below the surface, frightens us because it endlessly surprises us and drives us in a direction which society’s rules and organizations define as wrong or dangerous.”

— Anaïs Nin

107. “To love and to labor is the sum of living.”

— Anaïs Nin

108. “I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman.”

— Anaïs Nin

109. “Don’t let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.”

— Anaïs Nin

110. “The love of only one man or one woman is an enclosure.”

— Anaïs Nin

111. “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

112. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

113. “This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.”

— Anaïs Nin

114. “Compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity.”

— Anaïs Nin

115. “Nature forms us for ourselves, not for others; to be, not to seem.”

— Anaïs Nin

116. “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

117. “You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too.”

— Anaïs Nin

118. “When I don’t write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing.”

— Anaïs Nin

119. “Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.”

— Anaïs Nin

120. “Life, religion and art all converge in Bali. They have no word in their language for ‘artist’ or ‘art.’ Everyone is an artist.”

— Anaïs Nin

121. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

122. “Life is a full circle, widening until it joins the circle motions of the infinite.”

— Anaïs Nin

123. “The only transformer and alchemist that turns everything into gold is love. The only magic against death, aging, ordinary life, is love.”

— Anaïs Nin

124. “The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest.”

— Anaïs Nin

125. “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

126. “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

127. “He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.”

— Anaïs Nin

128. “I walk ahead of myself in perpetual expectancy of miracles.”

— Anaïs Nin

129. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

130. “We are cruel when someone refuses to play the role in which we have cast him. We judge a person only according to his relationship towards us.”

— Anaïs Nin

131. “I only believe in fire. Life. Fire. Being myself on fire I set others on fire. Never death. Fire and life.”

— Anaïs Nin

132. “Our love of each other was like two long shadows kissing without hope of reality.”

— Anaïs Nin

133. “Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go.”

— Anaïs Nin

134. “Is devotion to others a cover for the hungers and the needs of the self, of which one is ashamed? I was always ashamed to take. So I gave. It was not virtue. It was a disguise.”

— Anaïs Nin

135. “Your strength is soft, indirect, delicate, tender, womanly. But it is strength just the same.”

— Anaïs Nin

136. “Tranquillity is contagious, peace is contagious. One only thinks of the contagiousness of illness, but there is the contagion of serenity and joy.”

— Anaïs Nin

137. “Introspection is a devouring monster. You have to feed it with much material, much experience, many people, many places, many loves, many creations, and then it ceases feeding on you.”

— Anaïs Nin

138. “Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source.”

— Anaïs Nin

139. “You live out the confusions until they become clear.”

— Anaïs Nin

140. “Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.”

— Anaïs Nin

141. “Beware of allowing a tactless word, a rebuttal, a rejection to obliterate the whole sky.”

— Anaïs Nin

142. “Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.”

— Anaïs Nin

143. “The fiery moments of passionate experience are the moments of wholeness and totality of the personality.”

— Anaïs Nin

144. “I don’t wish power, only art -art and passion.”

— Anaïs Nin

145. “The unknown was my compass. The unknown was my encyclopedia. The unnamed was my science and progress.”

— Anaïs Nin

146. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

147. “Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.”

— Anaïs Nin

148. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

149. “The enemy of a love is never outside, it’s not a man or a woman, it’s what we lack in ourselves.”

— Anaïs Nin

150. “When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.”

— Anaïs Nin