Anais Nin famous quotes

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
-- Anais Nin

#Inspirational #Life #Inspiring

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.
-- Anais Nin

#Inspirational #Motivational #Positive

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
-- Anais Nin

#Truth #Reality #Political

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

#Pride #Worry #Talent

We are never trapped unless we choose to be.
-- Anais Nin

Don't let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.
-- Anais Nin

#Strength #Clouds #Sky

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

#Life #Change #Failure

You cannot save people. You can only love them.
-- Anais Nin

#Inspirational #Life #People

When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.
-- Anais Nin

#Being Yourself #Tolerance #World

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

#Life #Best Love #Love You

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

#Average #Unconventional #Want

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

#Inspirational #Life #Motivational

There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.
-- Anais Nin

#Freedom #Reality #Imagination

You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing.
-- Anais Nin

#Writing #Feelings #Wave

Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.
-- Anais Nin

#Life #Motivational #Inspiring

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 naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.
-- Anais Nin

#Love #Inspirational #Strength

I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically.
-- Anais Nin

#Profound #Abstract #Delicate

Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.
-- Anais Nin

#Together #Body #Separation

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.
-- Anais Nin

#Happiness #Knowledge #Fever

We have been poisoned by fairy tales.
-- Anais Nin

#Marriage #Fairy Tale #Fairy

People living deeply have no fear of death.
-- Anais Nin

#Life #Inspiring #Death

Good things happen to those who hustle.
-- Anais Nin

#Positivity #Nfl #Hustle

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.
-- Anais Nin

#Children #Dad #Father

I have no brakes on...analysis is for those who are paralyzed by life.
-- Anais Nin

#Analysis #Brake

I know why families were created with all their imperfections. They humanize you. They are made to make you forget yourself occasionally, so that the beautiful balance of life is not destroyed.
-- Anais Nin

#Family #Beautiful #Imperfection

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

#Love #Inspirational #Life

Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.
-- Anais Nin

#Thinking #Being Sad #Humanity

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

#Love #Life #Humility

It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar.
-- Anais Nin

#Insecurity

Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as indispensable as poetry.
-- Anais Nin

#Mean #Self #Self Knowledge

The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation. Sex does not thrive on monotony. Without feeling, inventions, moods, no surprises in bed. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all of the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.
-- Anais Nin

#Dream #Sex #Laughter

The earth is heavy and opaque without dreams.
-- Anais Nin

#Dream #Earth #Opaque

Nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a wordly way.
-- Anais Nin

#Imagination #Long #Perfect

Jazz is the music of the body.
-- Anais Nin

#Body #Jazz

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
-- Anais Nin

#Love #Writing #Heart

Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.
-- Anais Nin

#Inspirational #Life #Beautiful

I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.
-- Anais Nin

#Believe #Writing #World

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

#Inspirational #War #Chance

The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer. The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter, a talk on the street, a book, a phrase learned.
-- Anais Nin

#Book #Writing #Encounters

The richest source of creation is feeling, followed by a vision of its meaning.
-- Anais Nin

#Feelings #Vision #Creation

I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.
-- Anais Nin

#Stars #I Hate You #Hair

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.
-- Anais Nin

#Love #Mean #Different

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.
-- Anais Nin

#Love You #Joy #Want

We are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself.
-- Anais Nin

#Moon #Men

Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.
-- Anais Nin

#Visionaries #Use #Decline

Violence is a symptom of impotence.
-- Anais Nin

#Violence #Symptoms

Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.
-- Anais Nin

#Death #Dying #Life Death

You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too.
-- Anais Nin

#Mistake #Making Mistakes #Experiments

I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.
-- Anais Nin

#Boyfriend #Father #Long

The artist is the only one who knows that the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements.
-- Anais Nin

#Artist #Choices #Elements

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

#Inspirational Life #Memorable #Writing

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.
-- Anais Nin

#Dream #Remembrance #Effort

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

#People #Different

What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?
-- Anais Nin

#Love #Friendship #Real

He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie.
-- Anais Nin

#Addiction #Doe #Needs

Dreams are essential to life.
-- Anais Nin

#Dream #Psychics #Empowerment

I walk ahead of myself in perpetual expectancy of miracles.
-- Anais Nin

#Miracle #Anticipation #Walks

The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or a woman, it's what we lack in ourselves.
-- Anais Nin

#Life #Love Is #Men

When one is pretending, the entire body revolts.
-- Anais Nin

#Being Yourself #Acceptance #Unique

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

#Life #Wall #Freedom

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

#Self Esteem #Love Yourself #Eye

When I cannot bear outer pressures anymore, I begin to put order in my belongings...As if unable to organize and control my life, I seek to exert this on the world of objects.
-- Anais Nin

#Order #World #Pressure

I hate men who are afraid of women's strength.
-- Anais Nin

#Hate #Heart #Independent

All of my creation is an effort to weave a web of connection with the world: I am always weaving it because it was once broken.
-- Anais Nin

#Broken #Effort #Connections

When I am most deeply rooted, I feel the wildest desire to uproot myself.
-- Anais Nin

#Desire #Feels

Life is so fluid that one can only hope to capture the living moment, to capture it alive and fresh ... without destroying that moment.
-- Anais Nin

#Alive #Life Is #Moments

Pain is something to master, not to wallow in.
-- Anais Nin

#Pain #Masters

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.
-- Anais Nin

#Honesty #Bears #Ethics

Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.
-- Anais Nin

#Ordinary #Doe #True Happiness

I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.
-- Anais Nin

#Looks #Quiet #Transformation

Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.
-- Anais Nin

#Lying #Shame #About Yourself

You live out the confusions until they become clear.
-- Anais Nin

#Confusion #Clear

Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.
-- Anais Nin

#Break Up #People #World

Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one's self from enslavement by the earth.
-- Anais Nin

#Art #Self #Order

Life is a process of becoming. A combination of states we have to go through.
-- Anais Nin

#Becoming #Life Is #States

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.
-- Anais Nin

#Inspirational #Funny #New Year

The dangerous time when mechanical voices, radios, telephones, take the place of human intimacies, and the concept of being in touch with millions brings a greater and greater poverty in intimacy and human vision.
-- Anais Nin

#Voice #Vision #Radio

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.
-- Anais Nin

#Love #Good Morning #Coffee

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.
-- Anais Nin

#Love #Life #Letting Go

I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness.
-- Anais Nin

#Sisterhood #Want

How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.
-- Anais Nin

#Being Alone #Men #World

Dreams are necessary to life.
-- Anais Nin

#Life #Happiness #Dream

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
-- Anais Nin

#Love #Heartbreak #Dream

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.
-- Anais Nin

#Love #Inspirational #Friendship

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.
-- Anais Nin

#Love #Inspirational #Joy

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
-- Anais Nin

#Spiritual #Life Lesson #Nephew

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.
-- Anais Nin

#Inspirational #Life #Art

The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.
-- Anais Nin

#Love #Running #Dream

Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.
-- Anais Nin

#Love #Dream #Together

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.
-- Anais Nin

#Life #Truth #Character

The value of the personal relationship to all things is that it creates intimacy and intimacy creates understanding and understanding creates love.
-- Anais Nin

#Wisdom #Understanding #Intimacy

I am apparently gentle, unstable, and full of pretenses.  I will die a poet killed by the nonpoets, will renounce no dream, resign myself to no ugliness, accept nothing of the world but the one I made myself.  I wrote, lived, loved like Don Quixote, and on the day of my death I will say: ‘Excuse me, it was all a dream,’ and by that time I may have found one who will say: ‘Not at all, it was true, absolutely true.’
-- Anais Nin

#Dream #World #May

Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws.
-- Anais Nin

#Dream #Flaws #Failing

The ivory tower of the artist may be the only stronghold left for human values, cultural treasures, man’s cult of beauty.
-- Anais Nin

#Artist #Men #Ivory Tower

Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.
-- Anais Nin

#Sex #Heart #Together

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.
-- Anais Nin

#Love #Kissing #Two

What is love but acceptance of the other, whatever he is.
-- Anais Nin

#Love #Acceptance #What Is Love

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.
-- Anais Nin

#Life #Time #Illumination

I don't tell the truth any more to those who can't make use of it. I tell it mostly to myself, because it always changes me.
-- Anais Nin

#Truth #Use #Telling The Truth

Your eyes make me shy
-- Anais Nin

#Love #Crush #Eye