Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) was a French writer, best known for her diaries that she wrote almost sixty years, as well as her erotic literature. She was a friend, and also a lover, of many famous and eminent writers of her time, including Henry Miller, Antonin Artaud, Edmund Wilson, Gore Vidal and, Lawrence Durrell, etc. A passionate love affair with Henry Miller influenced her immensely in every aspect of her life. She lived the poetry she wrote, ahead of her time, in the world of imagination, dreams and irresistible sensuality.

Here is a collection of timeless and unforgettable Anaïs Nin quotes about love, sensuality, yearning, happiness and living life to the fullest.

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

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

Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions. – Anaïs Nin

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

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

You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you’re not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasn’t a banker anymore; he was a painter. And so he walked away from banking. I think we have a right to change course. But society is the one that keeps demanding that we fit in and not disturb things. They would like you to fit in right away so that things work now. – Anaïs Nin

You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken. – Anaïs Nin

I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. – Anaïs Nin

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. – Anaïs Nin

I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often. – Anaïs Nin

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. – Anaïs Nin

I prefer by far the warmth and softness to mere brilliancy and coldness. Some people remind me of sharp dazzling diamonds. Valuable but lifeless and loveless. Others, of the simplest field flowers, with hearts full of dew and with all the tints of celestial beauty reflected in their modest petals. – Anaïs Nin

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. – Anaïs Nin

What can I do with my happiness? How can I keep it, conceal it, bury it where I may never lose it? I want to kneel as it falls over me like rain, gather it up with lace and silk, and press it over myself again. – Anaïs Nin

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

If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation. – Anaïs Nin

I’m awaiting a lover. I have to be rent and pulled apart and live according to the demons and the imagination in me. I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again. – Anaïs Nin

At first power, power, then the wound, and love, and love and fears, and the loss of the self, and the gift, and slavery. At first I ruled, loved less; then more, then slavery. Slavery to his image, his odor, the craving, the hunger, the thirst, the obsession. – Anaïs Nin

I am the most tired woman in the world. I am tired when I get up. Life requires an effort I cannot make. Please give me that heavy book. I need to put something heavy like that on top of my head. I have to place my feet under the pillows always, so as to be able to stay on earth. Otherwise I feel myself going away, going away at a tremendous speed, on account of my lightness. I know that I am dead. As soon as I utter a phrase my sincerity dies, becomes a lie whose coldness chills me. Don’t say anything, because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you. – Anaïs Nin

When your beauty struck me, it dissolved me. Deep down, I am not different from you. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. I see in you that part of me which is you. I surrender my sincerity because if I love you it means we share the same fantasies, we share the same madness. – Anaïs Nin

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

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