Anais Nin

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

Life shrinks or expands according to one’s courage.
– Anais 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.
– Anais 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.
– Anais Nin

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

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

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

My diary is a mirror telling the story of a dreamer who, a long long time ago went through life
the way one reads a book.
– Anais Nin

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

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

Passion gives me moments of wholeness.
– Anais Nin

Love consists of not looking each other in the eye, but of looking outwardly in the same
direction.
– Anais Nin

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

Don’t let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.
– Anais Nin

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

What I cannot love, I overlook.
– Anais Nin

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

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

Love is the axis and breath of my life. The art I produce is a byproduct, an excrescence of
love, the song I sing, the joy which must explode, the overabundance – that is all.
– Anais 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.
– Anais Nin

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

All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always
punished.
– Anais 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.
– Anais Nin

I seek the real stuff of life. Profound drama.
– Anais 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.
– Anais Nin

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

The creative personality never remains fixed on the first world it discovers. It never resigns
itself to anything.
– Anais Nin

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

Someone told me the delightful story of the crusader who put a chastity belt on his wife and
gave the key to his best friend for safekeeping, in case of his death. He had ridden only a
few miles away when his friend, riding hard, caught up with him, saying, “You gave me the
wrong key!”
– Anais Nin

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

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.
– Anais Nin

Love reduces the complexity of living.
– Anais Nin

To lie, of course, is to engender insanity.
– Anais 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.
– Anais Nin

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

The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.
– Anais Nin

Experience teaches acceptance of the imperfect as life.
– Anais Nin

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

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

I write emotional algebra.
– Anais 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.
– Anais Nin

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

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

To withhold from living is to die… the more you give of yourself to life the more life nourishes
you.
– Anais Nin

Everything but happiness is neurosis.
– Anais Nin

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

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

This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.
– Anais Nin

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

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

The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the
rest.
– Anais Nin

My ideas usually come not at the desk writing but in the midst of living.
– Anais 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.
– Anais Nin

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

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

Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.
– Anais Nin

Human beings can reach such desperate solitude that they may cross a boundary beyond
which words cannot serve, and at such moments there is nothing left for them but to bark.
– Anais Nin

For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but
when we lose our minds.
– Anais Nin

No one but a woman in love ever sees the maximum of men’s greatness.
– 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

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

I hate men who are afraid of women’s strength.
– Anais Nin

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

We don’t have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical
sounds.
– Anais 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
naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.
– Anais Nin

The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.
– Anais Nin

I would say that compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity.
– Anais Nin

I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in
the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships, I want ecstacy. I am a
neurotic – in the sense that i live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am
adjusted to myself.
– Anais Nin

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

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

Passivity, like the passivity of India induced by religion, is destructive both to human life and
to art.
– Anais Nin

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

Dreams are necessary to life.
– Anais 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.
– Anais Nin

We are beginning to see the influence of dream upon reality and reality upon dream.
– Anais Nin