Anais Nin (1903–1977) was a French-born American diarist, essayist, novelist, and writer of short stories and erotica.
Here is a collection of Anais Nin most inspiring quotes: Anais Nin quotes about life, love, friends and travel. Quotes and sayings on Writing, growth, life, desire, women, friendship and courage by Anais Nin.
Anais Nin Quotes and Sayings
We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.
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.
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.
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.
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
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.
How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?
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.
I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.
Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.
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".
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.
I hate men who are afraid of women's strength.
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.
The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.
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.
There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.
We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.
From the backstabbing co-worker to the meddling sister-in-law, you are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.
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.
People living deeply have no fear of death.
The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.
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.
You cannot save people. You can only love them.
Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.
I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman.
Someone told me the delightful story of the crusader who put a chastity belt on his wife and gave the key to his best friend for safekeeping, in case of his death. He had ridden only a few miles away when his friend, riding hard, caught up with him, saying 'You gave me the wrong key!
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.
Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.
I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.
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.
Dreams are necessary to life.
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.
Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people's.
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.
We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.
The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
I write emotional algebra.
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.
I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic - in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.
What I cannot love, I overlook.
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.
Our love of each other was like two long shadows kissing without hope of reality.
Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.
I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.
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.
To think of him in the middle of the day lifts me out of ordinary living.
The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest.
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. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again.
Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.
In chaos, there is fertility.
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.
I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
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.
Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.
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
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.
He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.
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.
I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. 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.
There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.
I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often.
I want to make my own discoveries... penetrate the evil which attracts me.
Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.
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.
Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.
Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.
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.
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.
I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don't know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness.
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.
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.
In my childhood diary I wrote: "I have decided that it is better not to love anyone, because when you love people, then you have to be separated from them, and that hurts too much."
I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe.
life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity, & stumble from defeat to defeat.
I have no brakes on...analysis is for those who are paralyzed by life.
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.
We are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself.
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.
When one is pretending, the entire body revolts.
To hell, to hell with balance! I break glasses; I want to burn, even if I break myself. I want to live only for ecstasy. I'm neurotic, perverted, destructive, fiery, dangerous - lava, inflammable, unrestrained.
This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.
Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.
Passion gives me moments of wholeness.
Stories do not end.
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.
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.
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.
He was jealous of her future, and she of his past.
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.
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