110 Anais Nin Quotes On Being Fierce And Unapologetic

If you’re ready to broaden your perspective on life and read some truly mind-blowing quotes about life and love, you’ve come to the right place.

For today’s article, I’ve prepared an ultimate list of 110 Anais Nin quotes that will impress and intrigue you.

Anais Nin was a woman who lived her life fiercely and unapologetically.

In her writings, she shared her personal experiences, feelings, and thoughts, and thus has been inspiring women around the world to become free and independent.

As a fierce feminist I am myself, Anais has been one of my greatest inspirations for years.

With a lot of passion and dedication, I’ve revised a ton of material to collect only the greatest Anais Nin quotes from various sources on the web.

So, let’s begin!

Contents show

Top 10 Anais Nin Quotes

These 10 Anais Nin quotes are something I live by. Check them out!

1. “I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.” — Anais Nin

piece of paper with flowers representing Anais Nin quote

2. “You cannot save people; you can only love them.” — Anais Nin

3. “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” ― Anais Nin

4. “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” — Anais Nin

Anais Nin quote on a background decorated with flowers

5. “I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.” — Anais Nin

6. “Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.” — Anais Nin

7. “Whenever you do something that is not aligned with the yearning or your soul – you create suffering.” — Anais Nin

8. “I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.” ― Anais Nin

9. “Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. And then love will come to you, then it comes to you.” — Anais Nin

10. “I could be healed by the sheer courage of continuing to live. I could heal myself.” — Anais Nin

Inspirational Anais Nin Quotes

Check out these Anais Nin quotes for inspiration.

1. “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” — Anais Nin

2. “It takes courage to push yourself to places you have never been before… to test your limits… to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to stay tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” — Anais Nin

3. “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

4. “There is a resemblance between men and women, not a contrast. When a man begins to recognize his feeling, the two unite. When men accept the sensitive side of themselves, they come alive.” — Anais Nin

5. “It’s all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all.” — Anais Nin

6. “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

7. “Tranquillity is contagious, peace is contagious. One only thinks of the contagiousness of illness, but there is the contagion of serenity and joy.” — Anais Nin

8. “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

9. “I believe that in judging our actions we are more severe than professional judges. We judge not only our actions, but our thoughts, our intentions, our secret curses, our hidden hate.” — Anais Nin

10. “Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s!” — Anais Nin

11. “I sleep with my feet on moss carpets, my branches in the cotton of the clouds.” — Anais Nin

12. “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

13. “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.” — Anais Nin

14. “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

15. “You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too.” — Anais Nin

16. “Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.” — Anais Nin

17. “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.” — Anais Nin

18. “The self is merely the lens through which we see others and the world, and if this lens is not clear of distortions, we cannot perceive others.” — Anais Nin

19. “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

20. “When you possess light within, you see it externally.” — Anais Nin

Anais Nin Quotes On Love & Romance

Anais was not afraid to love. These mind-blowing Anais Nin quotes will help you let go of your fears and surrender to love.

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

2. “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

3. “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

4. “Don’t deceive me. My love is too new, too absolute, too deep.” — Anais Nin

5. “Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.” — Anais Nin

6. “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.” ― Anaïs Nin

7. “The more broadly and expansively you love, without exclusiveness, the more you reach the mystic whole, the larger sense of love, the less individualistic, the more universal love.” — Anais Nin

8. “I want you desperately. I want your strength and your softness, your hands, all of you. I want you, from me, to have the experience of being loved.” — Anais Nin

9. “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

10. “The only transformer and alchemist that turns everything into gold is love. The only magic against death, aging, ordinary life, is love.” — Anais Nin

11. “For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds, and you and I both lose it in the same way, through love.” — Anais Nin

12. “Love men and women not for their strength but their softness, not for their fullness but their hunger, not for their plenty but their need.” — Anais Nin

13. “As other girls prayed for handsomeness in a lover, or for wealth, or for power, or for poetry, she had prayed fervently: let him be kind.” — Anais Nin

14. “For women who are tied to the moon, love alone is not enough. We insist each day wrap its knuckles through our heartstrings and pull. The lows, the joy, the poetry. We dance at the edge of a cliff. You have fallen off. So it goes. You will climb up again.” — Anais Nin

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

16. “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

17. “You are that to me, an oasis. You drug me and at the same time you give me strength.” — Anais Nin

18. “She was fully, painfully aware that very rarely did midnight strike in two hearts at once, very rarely did midnight arouse two different equal desires, and that any dislocation in this, any indifference, was an indication of disunity, of the difficulties, the impossibilities of fusion between two human beings.” — Anais Nin

19. “Pure love, pure friendship—these are ideals. These may exist now and then, and they are beautiful things to behold. But they are not goals. They are phenomenal and accidental.” — Anais Nin

20. “Perhaps I have loved the artist because creation is the nearest we come to divinity.” — Anais Nin

Anais Nin Quotes To Change Your Perspective On Life

Next up is a collection of deep Anais Nin quotes that will change your perspective on life.

1. “There is a perfection in everything that cannot be owned.” — Anais Nin

2. “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.” — Anais Nin

3. “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

4. “If happiness is the absence of fever then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience and creation.” — Anais Nin

5. “The scar meant that I was stronger than what had tried to hurt me.” — Anais Nin

6. “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.” — Anais Nin

7. “I would not be concerned with the secrets, the lies, the mysteries, the facts. I would be concerned with what makes them necessary. What fear.” — Anais Nin

8. “We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art – we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.” — Anais Nin

9. “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

10. “The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present.” — Anais Nin

11. “I want to love you wildly. I don’t want words, but inarticulate cries, meaningless, from the bottom of my most primitive being, that flow from my belly like honey. A piercing joy, that leaves me empty, conquered, silenced.” — Anais Nin

12. “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.” ― Anaïs Nin

13. “What unites us universally is our emotions, our feelings in the face of experience, and not necessarily the actual experiences themselves.” — Anais Nin

14. “What everyone forgets is that passion is not merely a heightened sensual fusion but a way of life which produces, as in the mystics, an ecstatic awareness of the whole of life.” — Anais Nin

15. “For a few moments of ecstasy I am always willing to endure the pain.” — Anais Nin

16. “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

17. “We speak of the masculine and the feminine, but they are the wrong labels. It is really more a matter of poetry versus intellectualization.” — Anais Nin

18. “But I am not sure what this self is. For the moment I seem to be busy tearing down what I was.” — Anais Nin

19. “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

20. “I walk into the fires always. And come out more alive.” — Anais Nin

Thought-Provoking Anais Nin Quotes

Get ready for some thought-provoking quotes by Anais Nin.

1. “Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go.” — Anais Nin

2. “If all of us acted in unison as I act individually there would be no wars and no poverty. I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way.” — Anais Nin

3. “I believe the lasting revolution comes from deep changes in ourselves which influence our collective life.” — Anais Nin

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

5. “The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.” — Anais Nin

6. “I have no fear of God, and yet fear keeps me awake at night, fear of the devil. And if I believe in the devil, I must believe in God. And if evil is abhorrent to me, I must be a saint.” — Anais Nin

7. “The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.” — Anais Nin

8. “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

9. “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.” — Anais Nin

10. “Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.” — Anais Nin

11. “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.” ― Anais Nin

12. “I hate men who are afraid of women’s strength.” — Anaïs Nin

13. “I want to consume the whole world, devour it, chew it to pieces, and spit it out again – fresh, terrible, beautiful, alive in all its parts, alive and singing.” — Anais Nin

14. “What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements.” — Anais Nin

15. “Only in the fever of creation could she recreate her own lost life.” — Anais Nin

16. “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

17. “We are all engaged in the task of peeling off the false selves, the programmed selves, the selves created by our families, our culture, our religions. It is an enormous task because the history of women has been as incompletely told as the history of blacks.” — Anais Nin

18. “I was always ashamed to take. So I gave. It was not a virtue. It was a disguise.” — Anais Nin

19. “We are cruel when someone refuses to play the role in which we have cast him. We judge a person only according to his relationship towards us.” — Anais Nin

20. “How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?” ― Anais Nin

Beautiful Anais Nin Quotes To Impress You

Here are some more beautiful quotes by Anais Nin you don’t want to miss.

1. “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.” — Anais Nin

2. “I am a winged creature who is too rarely allowed to use its wings. Ecstasies do not occur often enough.” — Anais Nin

3. “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

4. “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 naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.” ― Anaïs Nin

5. “I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me.” — Anais Nin

6. “You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing.” — Anais Nin

7. “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

8. “I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.” — Anais Nin

9. “There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.” — Anais Nin

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

11. “The real wonders of life lie in the depths. Exploring the depths for truths is the real wonder which the child and the artist know: magic and power lie in truth.” — Anais Nin

12. “The same chemicals were used in the cooking as were used on the composition of her own being: only those which caused the most violent reaction, contradiction, and teasing, the refusal to answer questions but the love of putting them, and all the strong spices of human relationship which bore a relation to black pepper, paprika, soybean sauce, ketchup and red peppers.” ― Anaïs Nin

13. “Willingness to explore everything is a sign of strength. The weak ones have prejudices. Prejudices are a protection.” — Anais Nin

14. “There are books which we read early in life, which sink into our consciousness and seem to disappear without leaving a trace. And then one day we find, in some summing-up of our life and put attitudes towards experience, that their influence has been enormous.” — Anais Nin

15. “It’s not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.” — Anais Nin

16. “Idealism is the death of the body and the imagination. All but freedom, utter freedom, is death.” — Anais Nin

17. “My life is not possible to tell. I change every day, change my patterns, my concepts, my interpretations. I am a series of moods and sensations. I play a thousand roles. I weep when I find others play them for me. My real self is unknown. My work is merely an essence of this vast and deep adventure.” — Anais Nin

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

19. “I am more interested in human beings than in writing, more interested in lovemaking than in writing, more interested in living than in writing. More interested in becoming a work of art than in creating one.” — Anais Nin

20. “I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.” — Anais Nin

Final Words

Now that we went through 110 amazing Anais Nin quotes, it’s easy to tell that Anais was indeed ahead of her time.

The twentieth century gave birth to many remarkable women, but Anais is definitely one of a kind.

What’s the next inspiring woman you want me to write about? Let me know in the comments section below.

Until next time!