100 Anaïs Nin Quotes (On Courage, Life, Love)

Top 10 Quotes – Courage – Life – Love – Writing – More Quotes – Takeaways – Further Readings

Here are 100 of the best Anaïs Nin quotes for you.

But first, who was Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) exactly?

• She was a French-born American diarist, essayist, novelist, and writer of short stories
• She had Cuban parents and was raised in Europe
• She also lived in the U.S. from 1939 until her death
• She started her diaries at the age of 11 and continued for 60 years

You’ll learn a ton from her:

• How to be more courageous
• The value of embracing change
• The value of living your life fully
• And a lot more

One of the first quotes from Anaïs Nin that caught my attention is this one:

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.

It was around 2005-2006.

A year after I lost my girlfriend in a car accident.

And it was 100% true for me: I had lost my courage and vitality.

And my life was shrinking.

Day after day.

But reading her helped me understand the value of hard work, perseverance, and patience.

In sum, I hope you’ll love her quotes as much as I did (and still do).

Enjoy!

Top 10 Anaïs Nin Quotes

Good things happen to those who hustle. Anaïs Nin

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

I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing. Anaïs Nin

Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat. Anaïs Nin

To love and to labor is the sum of living. Anaïs Nin

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

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are. Anaïs Nin

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

People living deeply have no fear of death. Anaïs Nin

Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. And then love will come to you, then it comes to you. Anaïs Nin

Anaïs Nin Quotes About Courage

Pain is something to master, not to wallow in. Anaïs Nin

The dream has to be translated into reality. Anaïs Nin

When you possess light within, you see it externally. Anaïs Nin

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. Anaïs Nin

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. Anaïs Nin

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

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. Anaïs Nin

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. Anaïs Nin

The secret of joy is the mastery of pain. Anaïs Nin

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

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. Anaïs Nin

I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself. Anaïs Nin

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

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. Anaïs Nin

Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves. Anaïs Nin

The obstacle became his alibi for weakness. Anaïs Nin

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Anaïs Nin Quotes About Life

Passion gives me moments of wholeness. Anaïs Nin

Dreams are necessary to life. Anaïs Nin

My life is slowed up by thought and the need to understand what I am living. Anaïs Nin

Perfection is static, and I am in full progress. Anaïs Nin

I want to bite into life, and to be torn by it. Anaïs Nin

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

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. Anaïs Nin

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. Anaïs Nin

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

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. Anaïs Nin

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

Living never wore one so much as the effort not to live. Anaïs Nin

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

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

Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child’s blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality….I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence. Anaïs Nin

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. Anaïs Nin

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

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

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. Anaïs Nin

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

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

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

I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living. Anaïs Nin

I want to do things so wild with you that I don’t know how to say them. Anaïs Nin

Anaïs Nin Quotes About Love

You cannot save people you can only love them. Anaïs Nin

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

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

Someday I’ll be locked up for love insanity. “She loved too much.” Anaïs Nin

Love reduces the complexity of living. Anaïs Nin

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. Anaïs Nin

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. Anaïs Nin

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. Anaïs Nin

I adore the struggle you carry in yourself. I adore your terrifying sincerity. Anaïs Nin

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

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

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. Anaïs Nin

I was always ashamed to take. So I gave. It was not a virtue. It was a disguise. Anaïs Nin

You fall in love with people’s minds. Anaïs Nin

The scar meant that I was stronger than what had tried to hurt me. Anaïs Nin

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. Anaïs Nin

I despise my own hypersensitiveness, which requires so much reassurance. It is certainly abnormal to crave so much to be loved and understood. Anaïs Nin

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. Anaïs Nin

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

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

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. Anaïs Nin

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

Our love of each other was like two long shadows kissing without hope of reality. Anaïs Nin

To think of him in the middle of the day lifts me out of ordinary living. Anaïs Nin

He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt. Anaïs Nin

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love. Anaïs Nin

What I cannot love, I overlook. Anais Nin

Anaïs Nin Quotes About Writing

Write. Write until it stops hurting. Anaïs Nin

I write emotional algebra. Anaïs Nin

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. Anaïs Nin

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

We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art – we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones. Anaïs Nin

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. Anaïs Nin

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

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. Anaïs Nin

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

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

To write is to descend, to excavate, to go underground. Anaïs Nin

I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing. Anaïs Nin

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

More Anaïs Nin Quotes

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

If you can’t create, you destroy. Anaïs Nin

We have been poisoned by fairy tales. Anaïs Nin

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

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. Anaïs Nin

Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. Anaïs Nin

Whenever you do something that is not aligned with the yearning or your soul – you create suffering. Anaïs Nin

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. Anaïs Nin

I am a winged creature who is too rarely allowed to use its wings. Ecstasies do not occur often enough. Anaïs Nin

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. Anaïs Nin

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. Anaïs Nin

We don’t have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds. Anaïs Nin

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

Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself. Anaïs Nin

In chaos, there is fertility. Anaïs Nin

Conclusion

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. Anaïs Nin

Key Takeaways From Anaïs Nin’s Quotes

Here are 5 simple things you can learn from Anaïs Nin:

• Courage first. “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” When fear whispers, act anyway, and your world grows wider.
• Embrace change. “The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.” Pain can be useful to you, so treat each day as a chance to outgrow yesterday’s version of you.
• Love deeply. “Someday I’ll be locked up for love insanity. “She loved too much.”” Love is not measured by safety, but by presence; give yourself fully, and watch your relationships transform.
• Write honestly. “Write. Write until it stops hurting.” Whether in a diary or in conversation, honesty gives words their power; dare to tell your truth without masks.
• Live intensely. “In chaos, there is fertility.” Do not skim the surface of experience; lean into life with sensitivity, and ordinary moments become extraordinary.

Further Readings

• Topic: Life
• 100 Inspirational Quotes For Women To Empower You
• 75 Words of Wisdom From The Best Minds (Ever)
• 100 Decision Quotes For Better Decision Making (And Life)
• 79 Positive Quotes To Uplift Yourself
• Anaïs Nin on Amazon

I hope you enjoyed these inspiring quotes by Anaïs Nin.

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