Anaïs Nin Quotes

222 Sourced Quotes

Only when the poet and the scientist work in unison will we have living experiences and knowledge of the marvels of the universe as they are being discovered.

Anaïs Nin
Travel is seeking the lost paradise. It is the supreme illusion of love.

Anaïs Nin
For me, the adventures of the mind, each inflection of thought, each movement, nuance, growth, discovery, is a source of exhilaration.

Anaïs Nin
He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.

Anaïs Nin
The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation.

Anaïs Nin
There is no bleaker moment in the life of the city than that one which crosses the boundary lines between those who have not slept all night and those who are going to work. It was... as if two races of men and women lived on earth, the night people and the day people, never meeting face to face except at this moment.

Anaïs Nin
I love man as creator, lover, husband, friend, but man the father I do not trust. I do not believe in man as father. I do not trust man as father.

Anaïs Nin
No desire of the body, but for what lies in there, what lies in the flesh, the world, the thought, the creation, the illumination.

Anaïs Nin
Living never wore one out as much as the effort not to live, she believed, and only if one lived fully and freely one also rested fully and deeply.

Anaïs Nin
Our American culture made a virtue of our living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center, and so we lost our center and had to find it again.

Anaïs Nin
Nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a worldly way.

Anaïs Nin
At first she beckoned and lured one into her world; then, she blurred the passageways, confused all the images, as if to elude detection.

Anaïs Nin
Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.

Anaïs Nin
When she did finally fall asleep it was the restless sleep of the night watchman continuously aware of danger and of the treacheries of time seeking to cheat her by permitting clocks to strike the passing hours when she was not awake to grasp their contents.

Anaïs Nin
We love best those who are, or act for us, a self we do not wish to be or act out.

Anaïs Nin
We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection.... We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth.

Anaïs Nin
Life is so fluid that one can only hope to capture the living moment, to capture it alive and fresh... without destroying that moment.

Anaïs Nin
She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others.

Anaïs Nin
Mature people relate to each other without the need to merge.

Anaïs Nin
Although I love a rich life, I hate an overcrowded life. I believe in rumination and lose half the beauty of all things when I am deprived of the time to ruminate.

Anaïs Nin
For all of my patients sensuality is a giving in to 'the low side of their nature.' Puritanism is powerful and distorts their life with a total anesthesia of the senses. If you atrophy one sense, you also atrophy all the others, a sensuous and physical connection with nature, with art, with food, with other human beings.

Anaïs Nin
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 illnesses and wounds, it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings, but never a natural death. Every lover should be brought to trial as the murderer of his own love.

Anaïs Nin
The fiery moments of passionate experience are the moments of wholeness and totality of the personality.

Anaïs Nin
The richest source of creation is feeling, followed by a vision of its meaning.

Anaïs Nin
Only in the fever of creation could she recreate her own lost life.

Anaïs Nin
I am the one who has felt most deeply the stuttering of the tongue in its relation to thought.

Anaïs Nin
Beware of allowing a tactless word, a rebuttal, a rejection to obliterate the whole sky.

Anaïs Nin
The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic.

Anaïs Nin
Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore.

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

Anaïs Nin