Anaïs Nin Quotes

222 Sourced Quotes

Willingness to explore everything is a sign of strength. The weak ones have prejudices. Prejudices are a protection.

Anaïs Nin
Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one's self from enslavement by the earth. The earth demands servitude from us, menial tasks, earthy tasks, every day, every hour, and only at this moment at which we discard the servitude and enter the world of the spirit through music or painting or writing are we free.

Anaïs Nin
Because history is only an aggregate of personal hostilities, personal prejudices, personal blindness and irrationality, there are times when we have to live against it.

Anaïs Nin
Life, religion and art all converge in Bali. They have no word in their language for 'artist' or 'art.' Everyone is an artist.

Anaïs Nin
The one who travels like a lover searching for a new passion is suddenly blessed with new eyes, new ears, new senses.

Anaïs Nin
Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.

Anaïs Nin
There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person. To seek a total unity is wrong. To give as much meaning to one's life as possible is right to me.

Anaïs Nin
The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy.

Anaïs Nin
The hallucinatory drugs only reveal the world of images we contain but do not teach us interpretation, illumination, or enlightenment.

Anaïs Nin
There are only two kinds of freedom in the world: the freedom of the rich and powerful, and the freedom of the artist and the monk who renounce possessions.

Anaïs Nin
Electric flesh arrows, a second wave of pleasure falls over the first, a third which touches every nerve end, and now the third like an electric current traversing the body. A rainbow of color strikes the eyelids. A foam of music falls over the ears. It is the gong of the orgasm.

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...

Anaïs Nin
America is the greatest humiliator in existence. It is always cultivating the power you get from humiliating others.

Anaïs Nin
Also, I do not like the companionship of women. They are petty and personal. They hang on to their mysteries and secrets, they act and pretend. I like the character of men better.

Anaïs Nin
Life shrinks or expands according to one's courage.

Anaïs Nin
I love your silences, they are like mine. You are the only being before whom I am not distressed by my own silences. You have a vehement silence, one feels it is charged with essences, it is a strangely alive silence, like a trap open over a well, from which one can hear the secret murmur of the earth itself.

Anaïs Nin
I like extravagance. Letters which give the postman a stiff back to carry, books which overflow from their covers, sexuality which bursts the thermometers.

Anaïs Nin
Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.

Anaïs Nin
Paris-New York, the two high tension magnetic poles between life, life of the senses, of the spirit in Paris, and life in action in New York.

Anaïs Nin
The creative personality never remains fixed on the first world it discovers. It never resigns itself to anything.

Anaïs Nin
By shutting out the outside world, drugs place one not only in confrontation with the dreaming self, but also ones nightmares.

Anaïs Nin
Every word you wrote I ate, as if it were manna. Finding one's self in a book is a second birth; and you are the only one who knows that at times men behave like women and women like men, and that all these distinctions are mock distinctions.

Anaïs Nin
The imagination is far better at inventing tortures than life because the imagination is a demon within us and it knows where to strike, where it hurts. It knows the vulnerable spot, and life does not, our friends and lovers do not, because seldom do they have the imagination equal to the task.

Anaïs Nin
He was insane with anger. Or is all insanity anger?

Anaïs Nin
The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or woman, it's what we lack in ourselves.

Anaïs Nin
I know why families were created, with all their imperfections. They humanize you. They are made to make you forget yourself occasionally, so that the beautiful balance of life is not destroyed.

Anaïs Nin
When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.

Anaïs Nin
I miss the animal buoyancy of New York, the animal vitality. I did not mind that it had no meaning and no depth.

Anaïs Nin
The self is merely the lens through which we see others and the world, and if this lens is not clear of distortions, we cannot perceive others

Anaïs Nin
One handles truths like dynamite. Literature is one vast hypocrisy, a giant deception, treachery. All writers have concealed more than they revealed.

Anaïs Nin