Here we have put together a list of the 25 best quotes by Anais Nin.
Top 25 Anais Nin Quotes and Sayings
The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
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.
I hate men who are afraid of women's strength.
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".
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 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.
Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.
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 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.
I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.
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.
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?
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.
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.
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.
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
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.
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 not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.