She’s the queen of online inspirational quotes, but few people know who Anaïs Nin was. Born in France to Cuban parents in 1903, Nin moved to New York in the 1940s and made a name for herself as a fiercely creative and unapologetic voice, who often exhibited her numerous love affairs with famous authors, including Henry Miller and Gore Vidal, in her many diaries, essays, short stories, and erotica.

Spanning decades, Anaïs Nin’s honest and explicit accounts of her private life went where no other women authors would at the time — and her bold and intimate voice, charged with deep insights about life, love, growth, and fulfillment, brought her late recognition as one of the great writers of the 20th century.

Here are 24 Eye-Opening Anaïs Nin Quotes to Inspire Deeper Living

24 Eye-Opening Anaïs Nin Quotes to Inspire Deeper Living

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

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.

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.

You cannot save people; you can only love them.

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.

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

Anaïs Nin quotes - We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are

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

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.

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.

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.

Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning man holds unto you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic. 

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.

Anaïs Nin quotes - 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

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

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.

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

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

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. 

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.

Anaïs Nin quote: Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage

Dreams are necessary to life.

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

I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. 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. 

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

Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.

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