20+ Beautiful Anais Nin Quotes That Will Make You Think

We all want to be bold but what stops us is the thought – “what will society think”. Right? But there was a lady, Anais Nin – who turned popular for being fiercely honest about her private life. She is a French-Cuban American diarist, essayist, novelist, and writer of short stories and erotica. And is known as one of the great writers of the 20th century. Here are Anais Nin Quotes that reflect her bold and intimate voice.

She shared honest and explicit accounts of her love affairs with famous authors and other personal matters in her many novels, stories and erotica. Critics admire her as one of the finest writers of female erotica. She was one of the first women known to explore the realm of erotic writing to the fullest. And is famous as a prominent woman in the modern West known to write erotica. Anais was much ahead of her time, unashamedly feminine and lived her life deeply. Her thoughts, ideas and perspective towards life will leave you surprised.

Read on popular Anais Nin Quotes to gain inspiring insights on life, love, relationship, travel, self-discovery, self-development, and death.

1. “I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.” ― Anais Nin

2. “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” ― Anaïs Nin

3. “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” ― Anais Nin

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

5. “I hate men who are afraid of women’s strength.” ― Anaïs Nin

6. “The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.”― Anaïs Nin

7. “I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as the 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.” ― Anais Nin

8. 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.” ― Anais Nin

9. “Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.” ― Anais Nin

10. “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.” ― Anais Nin

11. Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age. – Anais Nin

12. “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.” ― Anais Nin

13. “Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.” ― Anaïs Nin

14. “People living deeply have no fear of death.” ― Anaïs Nin

15. “When one is pretending, the entire body revolts.” ― Anaïs Nin

16. “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.” ― Anais Nin

17. “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” ― Anais Nin

18.“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.” ― Anais Nin

19. “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.” ― Anaïs Nin

20. “Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s. ” ― Anaïs Nin

21. “Whenever you do something that is not aligned with the yearning or your soul—you create suffering.” ― Anaïs Nin

22. “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.” ― Anaïs Nin

23. “Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.” ― Anaïs Nin

24. “I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.” ― Anais Nin

25. “How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?” ― Anais Nin

26. “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.” ― Anais Nin

27. “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.” ― Anais Nin

28. “The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.” ― Anais Nin

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

30. “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.” ― Anais Nin

31. “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.” ― Anaïs Nin

32. “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” ― Anaïs Nin

33. “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.” ― Anais Nin

34. “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.” ― Anais Nin

35. “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” ― Anais Nin

36. “You cannot save people. You can only love them.” ― Anaïs Nin

37. “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.” ― Anais Nin

38. “The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.” ― Anais Nin

39. “If you limit yourself only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is compromise.”― Anais Nin

40. “My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts, my appearance, my talents, my flaws and to stop this incessant worrying that I can’t be loved as I am.” ― Anais Nin

41. “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.” ― Anais Nin

42. “The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.” ― Anais Nin

43. “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.” ― Anais Nin

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

Enjoyed reading Anais Nin Quotes? Which one is your favorite? Let us know in comments below and if you would like to anymore, feel free to do so.

You may also like:

Motivating Myself Or Pushing Myself?

This bracelet inscribed “Keep Going” was originally meant to inspire me because last year was a t

READ FULL ARTICLE ⇲

Up Next

Did you know that negativity can significantly hold you back in your life and prevent you from reaching your goals? However, it isn’t always easy to step into your power and transform your life.