26 Inspiring Anais Nin Quotes and Sayings

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Discover 26 inspiring Anais Nin quotes and sayings about journaling, self-knowledge, love, and life that are deeply reflective and thought-provoking. Anais Nin was a French writer, traveler, and essayist who became better known by publishing her diaries. And, here are 26 inspiring quotes by Anaïs Nin.

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Anais Nin biography

Anais Nin was born on February 21, 1903, in Neuilly, France. Her father was the composer and pianist Joaquín Nin, born in Cuba, where he returned later, but raised in Spain, and her mother was Rosa Culmel y Vigaro, of French-Cuban-Danish origin, a classical ear and very social. After a cosmopolitan childhood, Rosa settled in New York, in 1914, with her three children, – she had two other sons from a previous husband. She died on January 14, 1977, in Los Angeles.

Anais Nin Writing Career

Anais Nin was self-taught, spending much time in her youth traveling and reading in libraries. She wrote from a young age, mainly in French, and started writing in English after she was 17. Her career as a writer began in 1932 when she published a study of the work of D.H. Lawrence and continued later with several books. In the early 40s, she returned to New York and published her works at her own expense. The published part of them – ten whole volumes – covers the years from 1934 to 1974, where her career as a woman and an artist is highlighted, with admirable clarity and insight in analysis.

She spent over 40 years on the great journey of self-awareness and became famous for this reason. And, she believed that freedom is only granted by the long and arduous journey to self-knowledge. She published the first volume when he was already 63 years old and apart from a biographical work, it is also an undeniably artistic work. Each volume has a unified, homogeneous, and complete theme. Scenes and people are lively, which is clearly shown in the dialogues, and long observations, contrasted with enigmatic comments.

Although she was labeled a narcissist, her feminist leanings, along with her constant search for self-knowledge, made her an attractive speaker for lectures at American universities. Of course, she was never an activist in the feminist movement and never believed in changes in political systems, because: “Systems are perishable, so I feel that big changes will come from a big collective change in human consciousness.” The last volumes were published posthumously in the early 1980s.

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Henry and June: From “A Journal of Love,” The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
CREDIT: AMAZON

26 Inspiring Anais Nin Quotes and Sayings

7 Anais Nin Quotes about Writing and Journaling

Anais Nin remained relatively unknown until 1960 when she published her Diaries. And, the remarkable of this work is the fact that she began keeping her diaries at the age of 11.

“The diary had been her refuge, her workshop, and the act of writing her only stabilizer. “The journal is a product of the disease, perhaps an accentuation and exaggeration of it. I speak of relief when I write—perhaps—but it is also an engraving of pain, a tattooing on myself, a prolongation of pain.”
“Incidentally, this is one of the worst defects in all the journal writing—this tacking on of recently digested syntheses. No syntheses, please! And in the finished work, no slippery escapes, no short, pithy, ambiguous lines or sentences. Full out, or else nothing.”
“The hours that go to the journal are an evasion, fundamentally, of the imminent, the ever-impending problem—that of mastering your medium, of becoming the artist you are.”
“A writer could completely baffle a psychologist.” A writer and a woman, a woman with imagination, too, and a psychologist half blinded. Oh yea?” –
“Enter this laboratory of the soul where incidents are refracted into a diary, dissected to prove that every one of us carries a deforming mirror where he sees himself too small or too large, too fat or too thin… Once the deforming mirror is smashed, there is a possibility of wholeness; there is a possibility of joy.”
“What I’m asking for? Literature. Literature, my bread and wine.”
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”

8 Inspiring Anais Nin Quotes about Life

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”
“I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.”
“I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.”
“The day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
“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.”
“Whenever you do something that is not aligned with the yearning of your soul—you create suffering.”
“I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.”

5 Beautiful Anais Nin Quotes

“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.”
“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”
“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger than reason.”
“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.”
“Warmth, perfume, rugs, soft light, books.”

6 Anais Nin Quotes about Love

Lastly, here are five Anais Nin quotes and sayings about love:

“Don’t wait for it… Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. Create. And then the love will come to you, then it comes to you.”
“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.”
“How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?”
“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.”
“Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning man holds onto you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.”
“You cannot save people; you can only love them.”