Inspirational Quotes by Anais Nin (French-American Essayist)

Inspirational Quotations by Anais Nin (French-American Essayist)

Anaïs Nin (1903–77,) fully Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell, was a French-born American novelist, diarist, and artist.

Born in Neuilly, France, Nin studied psychoanalysis and was a patient of the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Influenced by the erotica of Surrealism in the 1930s, she wrote the novel House of Incest (1936,) the five-volume novel sequence Cities of the Interior (1947–54,) and erotica in Delta of Venus (1977) and Little Birds (1979.)

Nin wrote in obscurity for much of her life. Her writing went mostly unappreciated outside her artistic circle. Her anonymity changed when her introspective diaries started to be published in 1966.

Nin’s autobiographical seven-volume The Diary of Anaïs Nin (1966–80) portrayed the development of a female artistic self in the twentieth century. Her diaries struck a chord with readers during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and elevated her to the status of a cult figure.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Anais Nin

Truth is something which can’t be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Truth

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish it’s source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of withering, of tarnishing.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Love

And then the day came,
when the risk
to remain tight
in a bud
was more painful
than the risk
it took
to Blossom.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Risk-taking

One must be thrust out of a finished cycle in life, and that leap is the most difficult to make—to part with one’s faith, one’s love, when one would prefer to renew the faith and recreate the passion.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Life, Past, Moving on, Reflection, Change

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
Topics: Awareness, Being Ourselves, Realization, Acceptance

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
Topics: Women

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
Topics: Life

Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Living

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
Topics: Action, Dreams

What I cannot love, I overlook.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Friendship

I only believe in fire. Life. Fire. Being myself on fire I set others on fire. Never death. Fire and life. Les Jeux.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Belief

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
Topics: Action, Conscience

Woman does not forget she needs the fecundator, she does not forget that everything that is born of her is planted in her.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Women

I was thinking of my patients, and how the worst moment for them was when they discovered they were masters of their own fate. It was not a matter of bad or good luck. When they could no longer blame fate, they were in despair.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Confidence, Luck, Fortune

we travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
—Anais Nin

To change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard. If one changes internally, one should not continue to live with the same objects. They reflect one’s mind and psyche of yesterday. I throw away what has no dynamic, living use.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Moving on, Change

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
Topics: Friend, Friendship, Love, Friends

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.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Discovery, Risk, Self-Discovery, Growth, Action, Pain, Courage

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

If … happiness is the absence of fever then I will never know happiness. For I am posessed by a fever for knowledge, experience and creation.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Happiness, Absence, Knowledge

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Life, Bravery, Confidence, Courage

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
Topics: Dreams

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
Topics: Action

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
Topics: Excitement, Joy

I cannot concentrate all my friendship on any single one of my friends because no one is complete enough in himself.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Friendship

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
Topics: Growth

I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Family, Father, Fathers

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
Topics: Planning, Space, Goal, Failure

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

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Religion, Growth

Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Explanation

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
Topics: Life, Self-Discovery

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Love

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
—Anais Nin
Topics: Freedom

Our psychological reality, which lies below the surface, frightens us because it endlessly surprises us and drives us in a direction which society’s rules and organizations define as wrong or dangerous.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Individuality

We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Knowledge, Attitude, Perception, Perspective, Awareness

The violence and obscenity are left unadulterated, as manifestation of the mystery and pain which ever accompanies the act of creation.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Pornography, Creation

My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Ideas

When you possess light within, you see it externally.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Light

He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Gift