Top 380 Anaïs Nin Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 4 of 8

151. “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

152. “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

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

— Anaïs Nin

154. “The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body.”

— Anaïs Nin

155. “That is my essential reason for writing, not for fame, not to be celebrated after death, but to heighten and create life all around me. I also write because when I am writing I reach the high moment of fusion sought by the mystics, the poets, the lovers, a sense of communion with the universe.”

— Anaïs Nin

156. “The dream has to be translated into reality.”

— Anaïs Nin

157. “The richest source of creation is feeling, followed by a vision of its meaning.”

— Anaïs Nin

158. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

159. “I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.”

— Anaïs Nin

160. “There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don’t work.”

— Anaïs Nin

161. “Travel is seeking the lost paradise. It is the supreme illusion of love.”

— Anaïs Nin

162. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

163. “I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often.”

— Anaïs Nin

164. “I had a feeling that Pandora’s box contained the mysteries of woman’s sensuality, so different from a man’s and for which man’s language was so inadequate. The language of sex had yet to be invented. The language of the senses was yet to be explored.”

— Anaïs Nin

165. “In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude.”

— Anaïs Nin

166. “My first vision of earth was water veiled. I am of the race of men and women who see all things through this curtain of sea, and my eyes are the color of water.”

— Anaïs Nin

167. “I had been struck by the analogy between neurosis and romanticism. Romanticism was truly a parallel to neurosis. It demanded of reality an illusory world, love, an absolute which it could never obtain, and thus destroyed itself by the dream.”

— Anaïs Nin

168. “At sixteen, Sabina took moon baths, first of all, because everyone else took sun baths, and second, she admitted, because she had been told it was dangerous.”

— Anaïs Nin

169. “I have a prejudice against people with money. I have known so many, and none have escaped the corruption of power. In this I am a purist. I love people motivated by love and not by power. If you have money and power, and are motivated by love, you give it all away.”

— Anaïs Nin

170. “If I love you it means we share the same fantasies, the same madnesses.”

— Anaïs Nin

171. “The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.”

— Anaïs Nin

172. “My diary seems to keep me whole.”

— Anaïs Nin

173. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

174. “Jazz is the music of the body.”

— Anaïs Nin

175. “I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it.”

— Anaïs Nin

176. “In creation alone there is the possibility of perfection.”

— Anaïs Nin

177. “To change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard.”

— Anaïs Nin

178. “I love your silences, they are like mine.”

— Anaïs Nin

179. “The core of creation is to summon an image and the power to work with the image.”

— Anaïs Nin

180. “The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic.”

— Anaïs Nin

181. “Things aren’t the way they are, they’re the way you are.”

— Anaïs Nin

182. “Mature people relate to each other without the need to merge.”

— Anaïs Nin

183. “We are beginning to see the influence of dream upon reality and reality upon dream.”

— Anaïs Nin

184. “Perhaps a child, like a cat, is so much inside of himself that he does not see himself in the mirror.”

— Anaïs Nin

185. “The secret of life was Breath. That was what I always wanted my words to do, to Breathe.”

— Anaïs Nin

186. “The period without the diary remains an ordeal. Every evening I want my diary as one wants opium.”

— Anaïs Nin

187. “What a mystery this is, desire. The love sickness, the sensitivity, the obsession, the flutter of the heart, the ebb and flow of the blood. There is no drug and no alcohol to equal it.”

— Anaïs Nin

188. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

189. “If a person continues to see only giants, it means he is still seeing the world through the eyes of a child. I have a feeling that man’s fear of woman comes from having first seen her as the mother, creator of men.”

— Anaïs Nin

190. “Adolescence is like cactus.”

— Anaïs Nin

191. “I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated.”

— Anaïs Nin

192. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

193. “It’s all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all.”

— Anaïs Nin

194. “I like extravagance. Letters which give the postman a stiff back to carry, books which overflow from their covers, sexuality which bursts the thermometers.”

— Anaïs Nin

195. “I don’t hear your words: your voice reverberates against my body like another kind of caress, another kind of penetration. I have no power over your voice. It comes straight from you into me. I could stuff my ears and it would find its way into my blood and make it rise.”

— Anaïs Nin

196. “He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie.”

— Anaïs Nin

197. “If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.”

— Anaïs Nin

198. “I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.”

— Anaïs Nin

199. “Will you come down and kiss me good night?”

— Anaïs Nin

200. “The one who travels like a lover searching for a new passion is suddenly blessed with new eyes, new ears, new senses.”

— Anaïs Nin