Anaïs Nin Quotes

222 Sourced Quotes

Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.

Anaïs Nin
At sixteen, Sabina took moon baths, first of all, because everyone else took sun baths, and second, she admitted, because she had been told it was dangerous.

Anaïs Nin
A trite word is an overused word which has lost its identity like an old coat in a second-hand shop. The familiar grows dull and we no longer see, hear, or taste it.

Anaïs Nin
You are like a person who consumes herself in love and giving and does not know the miracles that are born of this.

Anaïs Nin
The dream, scrutinized by scientists in various experiments, has been found to be an absolute necessity to man.

Anaïs Nin
Poverty is the great reality. That is why the artist seeks it.

Anaïs Nin
I know perfectly well the cynic is a coward. He foresees all barrenness so that barrenness can never surprise him.

Anaïs Nin
Guilt is the one burden human beings can't bear alone.

Anaïs Nin
The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment with it, that was the miracle.

Anaïs Nin
In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again.

Anaïs Nin
To write at the same temperature at which I live I should write nothing but poetry.

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
The times in his studio when he washed his hands and they smoked, for his hands were so warm and the water so cold.

Anaïs Nin
Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.

Anaïs Nin
All the art of analysis consists in saying a truth only when the other person is ready for it, has been prepared for it by an organic process of gradation and evolution.

Anaïs Nin
The violence and obscenity are left unadulterated, as manifestation of the mystery and pain which ever accompanies the act of creation.

Anaïs Nin
You are so terribly nimble, so clever. I distrust your cleverness. You make a wonderful pattern, everything is in its place, it looks convincingly clear, too clear. And meanwhile, where are you? Not on the clear surface of your ideas, but you have already sunk deeper, into darker regions, so that one only thinks one has been given all your thoughts, one only imagines you have emptied yourself in that clarity. But there are layers and layers — you're bottomless, unfathomable. Your clearness is deceptive. You are the thinker who arouses most confusion in me, most doubt, most disturbance.

Anaïs Nin
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.

Anaïs Nin
America hates the artist. It will not admit: the artist is my soul and I want to kill off my soul.

Anaïs Nin
It is difficult to live with the pure. They do not condemn you; they forgive you. This forgiveness is more terrible than a judgment.

Anaïs Nin
Perhaps the only magician we have is the artist.

Anaïs Nin
Oh, God, I know no joy as great as a moment of rushing into a new love, no ecstasy like that of a new love. I swim in the sky; I float; my body is full of flowers, flowers with fingers giving me acute, acute caresses, sparks, jewels, quivers of joy, dizziness, such dizziness. Music inside of one, drunkenness. Only closing the eyes and remembering, and the hunger, the hunger for more, more, the great hunger, the voracious hunger, and thirst.

Anaïs Nin
My first vision of earth was water veiled. I am of the race of men and women who see all things through this curtain of sea and my eyes are the color of water. I looked with chameleon eyes upon the changing face of the world, looked with anonymous vision upon my uncompleted self. I remember my first birth in water.

Anaïs Nin
To write is to descend, to excavate, to go underground.

Anaïs Nin
Nowhere is inhumanity more revealed than in hospitals.

Anaïs Nin
The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest.

Anaïs Nin
I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.

Anaïs Nin
I don't tell the truth any more to those who can't make use of it. I tell it mostly to myself, because it always changes me, does something to me.

Anaïs Nin
The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer. The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter, a talk on the street, a book, a phrase learned.

Anaïs Nin
Love is the axis and breath of my life. The art I produce is a byproduct, an excrescence of love, the song I sing, the joy which must explode, the overabundance — that is all!

Anaïs Nin