Anais Nin Quotes

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

— Anais Nin

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

— Anais Nin

Whenever you do something that is not aligned with the yearning or your soul-you create suffering.

— Anais Nin

“The secret of life was Breath. That was what I always wanted my words to do, to Breathe.”

— Anais Nin

“When you possess light within, you see it externally.”

— Anais Nin

“What is love but acceptance of the other, whatever he is.”

— Anais Nin

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

“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

“"We see the world as 'we' are, not as 'it' is; because it is the "I" behind the 'eye' that does the seeing."”

— Anais Nin

It was while helping others to be free that I gained my own freedom.

— Anais Nin

I miss the animal buoyancy of New York, the animal vitality. I did not mind that it had no meaning and no depth.

— Anais Nin

“I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness.”

— Anais Nin

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

— Anais Nin

“The fiery moments of passionate experience are the moments of wholeness and totality of the personality.”

— Anais Nin

“The richest source of creation is feeling, followed by a vision of its meaning.”

— Anais Nin

“Dreams are essential to life.”

— Anais Nin

“Ordinary life does not interest me.”

— 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

“I don't tell the truth any more to those who can't make use of it. I tell it mostly to myself, because it always changes me.”

— Anais Nin

Nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a wordly way.

— Anais Nin

“Adolescence is like cactus.”

— Anais Nin

The bed must be a beautiful place, not only because you make love there but because you dream there as well.

— Anais Nin

“If one's conscious life is too rigid, too regimented, then the surface may crack at times, and we are unprepared for the strange emotions or sensations we experience.”

— Anais Nin

“The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.”

— Anais Nin

I have so strong a sense of creation, of tomorrow, that I cannot get drunk, knowing I will be less alive, less well, less creative the next day.

— Anais Nin

My trunk, valises and my mind are overpacked.

— Anais Nin

Anxiety is love's greatest killer, because it is like the stranglehold of the drowning.

— Anais Nin

Death from disillusion is not instantaneous, and there are no mercy killers for the disillusioned.

— Anais Nin

“In my dreams I sleep with everybody.”

— Anais Nin

“Destruction is ultimately self-destruction.”

— Anais Nin

“No one should be forced to carry the unfulfilled self of another.”

— Anais Nin

“If you can't create, you destroy.”

— Anais Nin

It is difficult to live with the pure. They do not condemn you; they forgive you. This forgiveness is more terrible than a judgment.

— Anais Nin

I find that life, day by day, is composed of at least one joy, one problem and one sorrow. Then there are the smaller ingredients: you always learn something, whether useful or harmful - that is difficult to analyze until later; you always give something; you alwayou always grow a little in one direction or another.

— Anais Nin

“Expressing feelings is linked directly with creation ... In this ability to tap the sources of feeling and imagination lies the secret of abundance.”

— Anais Nin

“In music I feel most deeply the passing of things.”

— Anais Nin

“In New York the acoustics are good for laughter, for life is all external, all action, no thought, no meditation, no dreaming, no reflection, only the exuberance of action.”

— Anais Nin

The preoccupation of the novelist: how to capture the living moments, was answered by the diary. You write while you are alive. You do not preserve them in alcohol until the moment you are ready to write about them.

— Anais Nin

“Everything but happiness is neurosis.”

— Anais Nin

“One always, sooner or later, comes upon a city which is an image of one's inner cities. Fez is an image of my inner self ... The layers of the city of Fez are like the layers and secrecies of the inner life. One needs a guide ... There were in Fez, as in my life, streets which led nowhere, impasses which remained a mystery.”

— Anais Nin

“Life, religion and art all converge in Bali. They have no word in their language for 'artist' or 'art.' Everyone is an artist.”

— Anais Nin

Either one fails in one's art or in one's life.

— Anais Nin

“Self-destructive patterns cause as much suffering as outer catastrophes.”

— Anais Nin

Poverty is the great reality. That is why the artist seeks it.

— Anais Nin

Gold never comes to the dreamers - except in dreams.

— Anais Nin

“My first vision of earth was water veiled. I am of the race of men and women who see all things through this curtain of sea, and my eyes are the color of water.”

— Anais Nin

“Poetry is the alchemy which teaches us to convert ordinary materials into gold.”

— Anais Nin

“To lie, of course, is to engender insanity.”

— Anais Nin

“To write is to descend, to excavate, to go underground.”

— Anais Nin

“Only love begets love.”

— Anais Nin