Top 380 Anaïs Nin Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

302. “I believe that in judging our actions we are more severe than professional judges. We judge not only our actions, but our thoughts, our intentions, our secret curses, our hidden hate.”

— Anaïs Nin

303. “I sat there for three hours and did not feel the time or the boredom of our talk and its foolish disconnection. As long as I could hear his voice, I was quite lost, quite blind, quite outside my own self.”

— Anaïs Nin

304. “Poetry is the alchemy which teaches us to convert ordinary materials into gold.”

— Anaïs Nin

305. “I love man as creator, lover, husband, friend, but man the father I do not trust. I do not believe in man as father. I do not trust man as father.”

— Anaïs Nin

306. “He was jealous of her future, and she of his past.”

— Anaïs Nin

307. “There are only two kinds of freedom in the world; the freedom of the rich and powerful, and the freedom of the artist and the monk who renounces possessions.”

— Anaïs Nin

308. “Idealism is the death of the body and the imagination. All but freedom, utter freedom, is death.”

— Anaïs Nin

309. “The leaf fall of his words, the stained glass hues of his moods, the rust in his voice, the smoke in his mouth, his breath on my vision like human breath blinding a mirror.”

— Anaïs Nin

310. “Tropical nights are hammocks for lovers.”

— Anaïs Nin

311. “Sometimes I think of Paris not as a city but as a home.”

— Anaïs Nin

312. “The softness of the summer day like an ermine paw.”

— Anaïs Nin

313. “I have an attitude now that is immovable. I shall remain outside of the world, beyond the temporal, beyond all the organizations of the world. I only believe in poetry.”

— Anaïs Nin

314. “A war regarded as inevitable or even probable, and therefore much prepared for, has a very good chance of eventually being fought.”

— Anaïs Nin

315. “I sleep with my feet on moss carpets, my branches in the cotton of the clouds.”

— Anaïs Nin

316. “You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead.”

— Anaïs Nin

317. “Descendants of pigeons once fed by Keats, Byron, George Sand, Chopin and many other famous lovers are still being fed, and the sudden sound when they all rise together, frightened away, is like the sound of giant sails flapping.”

— Anaïs Nin

318. “Since desire always goes towards that which is our direct opposite, it forces us to love that which will make us suffer.”

— Anaïs Nin

319. “The imagination is far better at inventing tortures than life because the imagination is a demon within us and it knows where to strike, where it hurts. It knows the vulnerable spot, and life does not, our friends and lovers do not, because seldom do they have the imagination equal to the task.”

— Anaïs Nin

320. “I was thinking of my patients, and how the worst moment for them was when they discovered they were masters of their own fate. It was not a matter of bad or good luck. When they could no longer blame fate, they were in despair.”

— Anaïs Nin

321. “I believe the lasting revolution comes from deep changes in ourselves which influence our collective life.”

— Anaïs Nin

322. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

323. “Writing more and more to the sound of music, writing more and more like music. Sitting in my studio tonight, playing record after record, writing, music a stimulant of the highest order, far more potent than wine.”

— Anaïs Nin

324. “Women always think that when they have my shoes, my dress, my hairdresser, my makeup, it will all work the same way. They do not conceive of the witchcraft that is needed. They do not know that I am not beautiful but that I only appear to be at certain moments.”

— Anaïs Nin

325. “You are the poet, you walk inside my dreams...”

— Anaïs Nin

326. “In every relationship, sooner or later, there is a court scene. Accusations, counter-accusations, a trial, a verdict.”

— Anaïs Nin

327. “The violence and obscenity are left unadulterated, as manifestation of the mystery and pain which ever accompanies the act of creation.”

— Anaïs Nin

328. “Convalescence. Such an utter weakness that you lie like an animal hibernating, playing possum. You float. You are adrift. Every current is stronger than you.”

— Anaïs Nin

329. “My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.”

— Anaïs Nin

330. “In music I feel most deeply the passing of things.”

— Anaïs Nin

331. “The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.”

— Anaïs Nin

332. “The monster I kill every day is the monster of realism. The monster who attacks me every day is destruction. Out of the duel comes the transformation. I turn destruction into creation over and over again.”

— Anaïs Nin

333. “When I am most deeply rooted, I feel the wildest desire to uproot myself.”

— Anaïs Nin

334. “I cannot concentrate all my friendship on any single one of my friends because no one is complete enough in himself.”

— Anaïs Nin

335. “I gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery.”

— Anaïs Nin

336. “Big Business and Politics are twins, they are the monsters who kill everything, corrupt everything.”

— Anaïs Nin

337. “Guilt is the one burden human beings can’t bear alone.”

— Anaïs Nin

338. “I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have shared my kingdom with you.”

— Anaïs Nin

339. “Introspection is a devouring monster.”

— Anaïs Nin

340. “The earth is heavy and opaque without dreams.”

— Anaïs Nin

341. “I’m sick of my own romanticism!”

— Anaïs Nin

342. “A trite word is an overused word which has lost its identity like an old coat in a second-hand shop. The familiar grows dull and we no longer see, hear, or taste it.”

— Anaïs Nin

343. “All that is sacred and taboo in the world are meaningless.”

— Anaïs Nin

344. “A man fell in love with Jeanne, and she tried to love him. But she complained that he uttered such ordinary words, that he could never say the magic phrase which would open her being.”

— Anaïs Nin

345. “If one’s conscious life is too rigid, too regimented, then the surface may crack at times, and we are unprepared for the strange emotions or sensations we experience.”

— Anaïs Nin

346. “The inner chambers of the soul are like the photographer’s darkroom. Like a laboratory. One cannot stay there all the time or it becomes the solitary cell of the neurotic.”

— Anaïs Nin

347. “Anxiety is love’s greatest killer, because it is like the stranglehold of the drowning.”

— Anaïs Nin

348. “One handles truths like dynamite. Literature is one vast hypocrisy, a giant deception, treachery. All writers have concealed more than they revealed.”

— Anaïs Nin

349. “In New York the acoustics are good for laughter, for life is all external, all action, no thought, no meditation, no dreaming, no reflection, only the exuberance of action.”

— Anaïs Nin

350. “Human beings can reach such desperate solitude that they may cross a boundary beyond which words cannot serve, and at such moments there is nothing left for them but to bark.”

— Anaïs Nin