Anais Nin

Anais Nin

31 quotes

Anais Nin is a French -born American author whose words have traveled far beyond their original audience. Anais Nin's observations on Love are as sharp as their thoughts on Life, revealing genuine breadth of mind. Discover 44 of Anais Nin's most memorable quotes, ranging across Love, Life, Dreams, Death, and Truth. A line that stays with you: "The only abnormality is the incapacity to love."

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

— Anais Nin

Life

All Quotes by Anais Nin

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

— Anais Nin

Friendship

“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

Morning

“I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.”

— Anais Nin

Dad

“When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.”

— Anais Nin

Religion

“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

Art

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

— Anais Nin

Courage

“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

Dreams

“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 witherings, of tarnishings.”

— Anais Nin

Death

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

— Anais Nin

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.”

— Anais Nin

Art

“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

Courage

“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

Love

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

— Anais Nin

Nature

“The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.”

— Anais Nin

Life

“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

Truth

“What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?”

— Anais Nin

Friendship

“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

Truth

“I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.”

— Anais Nin

Love

“Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.”

— Anais Nin

Age

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

— Anais Nin

Knowledge