Anaïs Nin quotes

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

Anaïs Nin

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

Anaïs Nin

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

Anaïs Nin

We don’t see the things the way they are. We see things the way we are.

Anaïs Nin

Sensuality as nature, with possibilities of ecstasy and joy.

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 withering, of tarnishing.

Anaïs Nin

For me, the adventures of the mind, each inflection of thought, each movement, nuance, growth, discovery, is a source of exhilaration.

Anaïs Nin

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.

Anaïs Nin

It takes courage to push yourself to places that you have never been before, to test your limits, to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

Anaïs Nin

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

Anaïs Nin

Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.

Anaïs Nin

Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.

Anaïs Nin

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

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 only abnormality is the inability to love.

Anaïs Nin

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

Anaïs Nin

Each friend represents a world in us, a world not possibly born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

Anaïs Nin

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 cannot 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.

Anaïs Nin

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

Anaïs Nin

The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy.

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

Dreams are necessary to life.

Anaïs Nin

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

Anaïs Nin

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

Anaïs Nin

Love is the axis and breath of my life.

Anaïs Nin

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

Anaïs Nin

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

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

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

Anaïs Nin

The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic.

Anaïs Nin

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.

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

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

When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.

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