Anaïs Nin Quotes

222 Sourced Quotes

Through love, through friendship, a heart lives more than one life.

Anaïs Nin
Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.

Anaïs Nin
No one should be forced to carry the unfulfilled self of another.

Anaïs Nin
Is devotion to others a cover for the hungers and the needs of the self, of which one is ashamed? I was always ashamed to take. So I gave. It was not a virtue. It was a disguise.

Anaïs Nin
If you are terribly truthful, the ground will always move from under you, and you will have to shift with the constantly shifting truth.

Anaïs Nin
We must protect the minority writers because they are the research workers of literature. They keep it alive. It has been fashionable of late to seek out and force such writers into more popular channels, to the detriment of both writer and an unprepared public.

Anaïs Nin
The basis of insincerity is the idealized image we hold of ourselves and wish to impose on others.

Anaïs Nin
What a mystery this is, desire. The love sickness, the sensitivity, the obsession, the flutter of the heart, the ebb and flow of the blood. There is no drug and no alcohol to equal it.

Anaïs Nin
A city never entirely known, yet which gives you the feeling of intimacy, of possessing it intimately.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
There is no denying that we are suffering from a collective neurosis and the novel which does not face this is not a novel of our time.

Anaïs Nin
When I stand at the top of the Champs-Elysées, with its chestnut trees in flower, its undulations of shining cars, its white spaciousness, I feel as if I were biting into a utopian fruit, something velvety and lustrous and rich and vivid.

Anaïs Nin
The sap rising in the trees does not rise each year with greater strength, but life rises in me each year with greater strength, and can I endure it? The symphonic concerts of the birds do not get louder, but my cries of exultation, yes, and can others endure it?

Anaïs Nin
I cannot concentrate all my friendship on any single one of my friends because no one is complete enough in himself.

Anaïs Nin