Looking for the best and inspirational Anaïs Nin quotes?
Anaïs Nin is a well-known author and is widely regarded as one of the most influential female authors of the 20th century. She was born on February 21, 1903, and died on January 14, 1977.
She was born in Chicago, Illinois, to an anarchist family. Her father was an inventor who worked at a steel factory, and her mother was a concert pianist who also taught music and dance classes. She had three brothers: Carlos, who died in childhood, Paulo, and Ricardo. Anaïs grew up very actively participating in her family’s intellectual life. At age 4 she learned to read from reading books but before then had only heard stories from her parents.
Here are some of her most inspirational quotes that will open your eyes and inspire you deeper
73 Most Inspiring Anaïs Nin Quotes
“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.”
“Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments.”
“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.”
“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”
“There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.”
“Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.”
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”
“The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest.”
“People living deeply have no fear of death.”
“The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.”
“We efface an hour by passionate love, without twists, without after-taste. When it is finished, it is not finished, we lie still in each other’s arms lulled by our love, by tenderness — sensuality in which the whole being can participate.”
“Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.”
“The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.”
“Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.”
“The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.”
“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.”
“There are only two kinds of freedom in the world; the freedom of the rich and powerful, and the freedom of the artist and the monk who renounces possessions.”
“Whenever you do something that is not aligned with the yearning or your soul—you create suffering.”
“To withhold from living is to die … the more you give of yourself to life the more life nourishes you.”
“Every word you wrote I ate, as if it were manna.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.”
“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.”
“Do not seek the because — in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.”
“Risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
“The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.”
“My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.”
“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.”
““Some people read to confirm their own hopelessness. Others read to be rescued from it.”
“Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.”
“What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?”
“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.”
“Pain is something to master, not to wallow in.”
“Only in the fever of creation could she recreate her own lost life.”
“Truth is something which can’t be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.”
“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.”
“Passion gives me moments of wholeness.”
“Every word you wrote I ate, as if it were manna. Finding one’s self in a book is a second birth; and you are the only one who knows that at times men behave like women and women like men, and that all these distinctions are mock distinctions.”
“Nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a wordly way.”
“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.”
“Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning man holds unto you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic. ”
“Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.”
“Whenever you do something that is not aligned with the yearning or your soul — you create suffering.”
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
“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.”
“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”
“You cannot save people; you can only love them.”
“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 — lama, inflammable, unrestrained.”
“Dreams are necessary to life.”
“We are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself.”
“How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.”
“I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.”
“Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.”
“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. ”
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
“All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished.”
““Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.””
“When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.”
“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.”
“We write to taste life twice: in the moment and in retrospection.”
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage”
“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.”
“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.”
“Life is so fluid that one can only hope to capture the living moment, to capture it alive and fresh … without destroying that moment.”
“I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.”
“Worlds self made are so full of monsters and demons.”
“Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one’s self from enslavement by the earth.”
“I want my eroticism mixed with love. And deep love one does not often experience.”
“Only the united beat of sex and the heart can create ecstasy.”
“You write while you are alive. You do not preserve them in alcohol until the moment you are ready to write about them.”
