Anaïs Nin Quotes
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301. “Woman does not forget she needs the fecundator, she does not forget that everything that is born of her is planted in her.”

— Anaïs Nin

302. “Experience teaches acceptance of the imperfect as life.”

— Anaïs Nin

303. “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 renounces possessions.”

— Anaïs Nin

304. “In every relationship, sooner or later, there is a court scene. Accusations, counter-accusations, a trial, a verdict.”

— Anaïs Nin

305. “This morning I got up to begin this book I coughed. Something was coming out of my throat: it was strangling me. I broke the thread which held it and yanked it out. I went back to bed and said: I have just spat out my heart.”

— Anaïs Nin

306. “Truth is something which can’t be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.”

— Anaïs Nin

307. “I gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery.”

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

309. “In music I feel most deeply the passing of things.”

— Anaïs Nin

310. “Human beings can reach such desperate solitude that they may cross a boundary beyond which words cannot serve, and at such moments there is nothing left for them but to bark.”

— Anaïs Nin

311. “There is a resemblance between men and women, not a contrast. When a man begins to recognize his feeling, the two unite. When men accept the sensitive side of themselves, they come alive.”

— Anaïs Nin

312. “The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it. I will work, I will love my husband, but I will fulfill myself.”

— Anaïs Nin

313. “In creation alone there is the possibility of perfection.”

— Anaïs Nin

314. “One handles truths like dynamite.”

— Anaïs Nin

315. “The dangerous time when mechanical voices, radios, telephones, take the place of human intimacies, and the concept of being in touch with millions brings a greater and greater poverty in intimacy and human vision.”

— Anaïs Nin

316. “The two men who have done the greatest harm to the world are Christ and Columbus. Christ taught us guilt and sacrifice, to live only in the other world, and Columbus discovered America and materialism.”

— Anaïs Nin

317. “The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.”

— Anaïs Nin

318. “I want to fall in love in such a way that the mere sight of a man, even a block away from me, will shake and pierce me, will weaken me, and make me tremble and soften and melt.”

— Anaïs Nin

319. “Strange, isn’t it, that no chemical will give a human being the iridescence that illusions have given them? Give me your hat.”

— Anaïs Nin

320. “If all of us acted in unison as I act individually there would be no wars and no poverty. I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way.”

— Anaïs Nin

321. “I have so strong a sense of creation, of tomorrow, that I cannot get drunk, knowing I will be less alive, less well, less creative the next day.”

— Anaïs Nin

322. “I palliate the sufferings of others. yes I see myself as softening the blows, dissolving acids, neutralizing poisons, every moment of the day. I try to fulfill the wishes of others, to perform miracles. I exert myself performing miracles.”

— Anaïs Nin

323. “America hates the artist. It will not admit: the artist is my soul and I want to kill off my soul.”

— Anaïs Nin

324. “Women always think that when they have my shoes, my dress, my hairdresser, my makeup, it will all work the same way. They do not conceive of the witchcraft that is needed. They do not know that I am not beautiful but that I only appear to be at certain moments.”

— Anaïs Nin

325. “I prefer empty cages, Sabina, until I find a unique bird I once saw in my dreams.”

— Anaïs Nin

326. “I cheat him, I deceive him, yet the world does not sink in sulphur-colored mists. Madness conquers. I can no longer put my mosaics together. I just cry and laugh.”

— Anaïs Nin

327. “I see myself wrapped in lies, which do not seem to penetrate my soul, as if they are not really a part of me. They are like costumes.”

— Anaïs Nin

328. “To the woman with the least intelligence, there must come, at some time or other, the realization that housework is animal work and that there are other occupations in the world a thousand times more refined, more enriching, for which she is also suited and to which she has a right.”

— Anaïs Nin

329. “I must know, he thinks. It must be clear to me. There is a world which is closed to him, a world of shadings, gradations, nuances, and subtleties. He is a genius and yet he is too explicit. June slips between his fingers. You cannot posses without loving.”

— Anaïs Nin

330. “Asia discovered two remedies for the cruelty of man, art and religion. America discarded both and is drowning in hate and aggressivity.”

— Anaïs Nin

331. “The ivory tower of the artist may be the only stronghold left for human values, cultural treasures, man’s cult of beauty.”

— Anaïs Nin

332. “They courted the face on the screen, the face of translucence, the face of wax on which men found it possible to imprint the image of their fantasy.”

— Anaïs Nin

333. “Either one fails in one’s art or in one’s life.”

— Anaïs Nin

334. “In my dreams I sleep with everybody.”

— Anaïs Nin

335. “Since desire always goes towards that which is our direct opposite, it forces us to love that which will make us suffer.”

— Anaïs Nin

336. “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

337. “To change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard.”

— Anaïs Nin

338. “I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife. I think highly of faithfulness. But my temperament belongs to the writer, not to the woman.”

— Anaïs Nin

339. “The Frenchman, by nature, is sensuous and sensitive. He has intelligence, which makes him tired of life sooner than other kinds of men. He is not athletic: he sees the futility of the pursuit of fame; the climate at times depresses him.”

— Anaïs Nin

340. “Secrets. Need to disguise. The novel was born of this.”

— Anaïs Nin

341. “A man who lives unrelated to other human beings dies. But a man who lives unrelated to himself also dies.”

— Anaïs Nin

342. “Anxiety is loves greatest killer.”

— Anaïs Nin

343. “Most artists have retired too absolutely; they grow rusty, inflexible to the flow of currents.”

— Anaïs Nin

344. “Anxiety is love’s greatest killer, because it is like the stranglehold of the drowning.”

— Anaïs Nin

345. “He has, like me, a sense of smell. I let him inhale me, then I slip away.”

— Anaïs Nin

346. “There are books which we read early in life, which sink into our consciousness and seem to disappear without leaving a trace. And then one day we find, in some summing-up of our life and put attitudes towards experience, that their influence has been enormous.”

— Anaïs Nin

347. “I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.”

— Anaïs Nin

348. “I am a failure as a writer. The publishers won’t publish me, the bookshops won’t carry my books, the critics won’t write about me. I am excluded from all anthologies, and completely ignored.”

— Anaïs Nin

349. “One must be thrust out of a finished cycle in life, and that leap is the most difficult to make – to part with one’s faith, one’s love, when one would prefer to renew the faith and recreate the passion.”

— Anaïs Nin

350. “The basis of insincerity is the idealized image we hold of ourselves and wish to impose on others.”

— Anaïs Nin