Anaïs Nin - Life Quotes

36 Sourced Quotes

View all Anaïs Nin Quotes
My life is slowed up by thought and the need to understand what I am living.

Anaïs Nin
When I cannot bear outer pressures any more, I begin to put order in my belongings. I get satisfaction from perfect order in my papers, in my clothes, in the house. I carry this to excess. As if unable to organize and control my life, I seek to exert this on the world of objects.

Anaïs Nin
He had a mania for washing and disinfecting himself. The fear of microbes played a very important part in his life.... For him the only danger came from the microbes which attacked the body. He had not studied the microbe of conscience which eats into the soul.

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

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
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
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
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
Life shrinks or expands according to one's courage.

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
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
This abdiction of life demanded of the artist is to be achieved only relatively. Most artists have retired too absolutely; they grow rusty, inflexible to the flow of currents.

Anaïs Nin
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.

Anaïs Nin
I find that life, day by day, is composed of at least one joy, one problem and one sorrow. Then there are the smaller ingredients: you always learn something, whether useful or harmful — that is difficult to analyze until later; you always give something; you always grow a little in one direction or another.

Anaïs Nin
Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.

Anaïs Nin
To withhold from living is to die... the more you give of yourself to life the more life nourishes you.

Anaïs Nin
It was a misunderstanding to stress the dream like quality of the novels. What I meant to stress was the interrelation between dream and life, between dream and action.

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 need a place where I can shout and weep. I have to be a Spanish savage at some time of the day. I record here the hysteria life causes in me. The overflow of an undisciplined extravagance. To hell with taste and art, with all contractions and polishings. Here I shout, I dance, I weep, I gnash my teeth, I go mad — all by myself, in bad English, in chaos. It will keep me sane for the world and for art.

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
Most fiction writers uses dreams decoratively without relating them to daily life, but the contemporary writer is becoming more expert at detecting the influence of one upon the other.

Anaïs Nin
I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. 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.

Anaïs Nin
I think that natural truths will cease to be spat at us like insults, that aesthetics will once more be linked with ethics, and that people will become aware that in casting out aesthetics that they also cast out a respect for human life, a respect for creation, a respect for spiritual values. Aesthetics was an expression of man's need to be in love with his world. The cult of ugliness is a regression. It destroys our appetite, our love for our world.

Anaïs Nin
Passivity, like the passivity of India induced by religion, is destructive both to human life and to art.

Anaïs Nin
I never liked the language of Henry Miller. I don't think pornography has added to our sensual life.

Anaïs Nin