Top 380 Anaïs Nin Quotes (2023 Update)
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151. “I had been struck by the analogy between neurosis and romanticism. Romanticism was truly a parallel to neurosis. It demanded of reality an illusory world, love, an absolute which it could never obtain, and thus destroyed itself by the dream.”

— Anaïs Nin

152. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

153. “The fiery moments of passionate experience are the moments of wholeness and totality of the personality.”

— Anaïs Nin

154. “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

155. “The unknown was my compass. The unknown was my encyclopedia. The unnamed was my science and progress.”

— Anaïs Nin

156. “I don’t wish power, only art -art and passion.”

— Anaïs Nin

157. “Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.”

— Anaïs Nin

158. “When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.”

— Anaïs Nin

159. “The artist is the only one who knows that the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements.”

— Anaïs Nin

160. “The enemy of a love is never outside, it’s not a man or a woman, it’s what we lack in ourselves.”

— Anaïs Nin

161. “I walked into my own book, seeking peace. It was night, and I made a careless movement inside the dream; I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself against my madness.”

— Anaïs Nin

162. “Jazz is the music of the body.”

— Anaïs Nin

163. “My diary seems to keep me whole.”

— Anaïs Nin

164. “I love your silences, they are like mine.”

— Anaïs Nin

165. “The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body.”

— Anaïs Nin

166. “Mature people relate to each other without the need to merge.”

— Anaïs Nin

167. “The secret of life was Breath. That was what I always wanted my words to do, to Breathe.”

— Anaïs Nin

168. “Perhaps a child, like a cat, is so much inside of himself that he does not see himself in the mirror.”

— Anaïs Nin

169. “The period without the diary remains an ordeal. Every evening I want my diary as one wants opium.”

— Anaïs Nin

170. “We are all engaged in the task of peeling off the false selves, the programmed selves, the selves created by our families, our culture, our religions. It is an enormous task because the history of women has been as incompletely told as the history of blacks.”

— Anaïs Nin

171. “If a person continues to see only giants, it means he is still seeing the world through the eyes of a child. I have a feeling that man’s fear of woman comes from having first seen her as the mother, creator of men.”

— Anaïs Nin

172. “Adolescence is like cactus.”

— Anaïs Nin

173. “I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated.”

— Anaïs Nin

174. “What everyone forgets is that passion is not merely a heightened sensual fusion but a way of life which produces, as in the mystics, an ecstatic awareness of the whole of life.”

— Anaïs Nin

175. “It’s all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all.”

— Anaïs Nin

176. “If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.”

— Anaïs Nin

177. “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

178. “He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie.”

— Anaïs Nin

179. “I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.”

— Anaïs Nin

180. “I don’t hear your words: your voice reverberates against my body like another kind of caress, another kind of penetration. I have no power over your voice. It comes straight from you into me. I could stuff my ears and it would find its way into my blood and make it rise.”

— Anaïs Nin

181. “I have a prejudice against people with money. I have known so many, and none have escaped the corruption of power. In this I am a purist. I love people motivated by love and not by power. If you have money and power, and are motivated by love, you give it all away.”

— Anaïs Nin

182. “There is a fissure in my vision and madness will always rush through.”

— Anaïs Nin

183. “If I love you it means we share the same fantasies, the same madnesses.”

— Anaïs Nin

184. “I love my mystery, I love the abstract world I live in, the delicate, profound, vague, obscure, voluptuously, wordless sensations I experience.”

— Anaïs Nin

185. “Coming near him like a ballet dancer she took a leap towards him, and he, frightened by her vehemence, and fearing that she would crash against him, instinctively became absolutely rigid, and she felt herself embracing a statue.”

— Anaïs Nin

186. “For too many centuries women have been being muses to artists. I wanted to be the muse, I wanted to be the wife of the artist, but I was really trying to avoid the final issue – that I had to do the job myself.”

— Anaïs Nin

187. “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

188. “I never liked the language of Henry Miller. I don’t think pornography has added to our sensual life.”

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

190. “All of my creation is an effort to weave a web of connection with the world: I am always weaving it because it was once broken.”

— Anaïs Nin

191. “Warmth, perfume, rugs, soft lights, books. They do not appease me. I am aware of time passing, of all the world contains that I have not seen, of all the interesting people I have not met.”

— Anaïs Nin

192. “Keeping a Diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements essential to the vitality of writing.”

— Anaïs Nin

193. “Memory is a great betrayer.”

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

195. “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

196. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

197. “It is easy to love and there are so many ways to do it.”

— Anaïs Nin

198. “Things aren’t the way they are, they’re the way you are.”

— Anaïs Nin

199. “All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished.”

— Anaïs Nin

200. “How well I know with what burning intensity you live. You have experienced many lives already, including several you have shared with me- full rich lives from birth to death, and you just have to have these rest periods in between.”

— Anaïs Nin