Top 380 Anaïs Nin Quotes (2023 Update)
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351. “We three belong to the Middle Ages. We have this need of heroism, and there is no place for such feelings in modern life. That is our tragedy. Once I wanted to be a saint. It seemed the only absolute act left to do, for what is most powerful in me is the craving for purity, greatness.”

— Anaïs Nin

352. “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

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

— Anaïs Nin

354. “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

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

— Anaïs Nin

356. “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

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

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

359. “Nowhere is inhumanity more revealed than in hospitals.”

— Anaïs Nin

360. “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

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

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

363. “Anxiety is loves greatest killer.”

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

366. “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

367. “I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced.”

— Anaïs Nin

368. “I seek the real stuff of life. Profound drama.”

— Anaïs Nin

369. “When I first met him, he did not care if a friend did not fit into his world, because at that time his world had not been born yet.”

— Anaïs Nin

370. “The dream has to be translated into reality.”

— Anaïs Nin

371. “He understands my pity for his ridiculous, humiliating physical necessity.”

— Anaïs Nin

372. “I will not be just a tourist in a world of images.”

— Anaïs Nin

373. “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

374. “I see enormous loves growing immense and finally crushing me.”

— Anaïs Nin

375. “There is an ugliness in being paid for work one does not like.”

— Anaïs Nin

376. “New York has an electronic heart.”

— Anaïs Nin

377. “We sit on the kitchen exchanging these diabolical outgrowths of overfertile minds.”

— Anaïs Nin

378. “When I hear of people who weary of each other, I believe it is because they have sought virtues in themselves alone, attractions of physical beauty. Have they based their love on each other’s thoughts? Who can weary of thoughts which change every day?”

— Anaïs Nin

379. “Violence is a symptom of impotence.”

— Anaïs Nin

380. “The child who is uprooted begins to recognize that what he builds within himself is what will endure, what will withstand shattering experiences.”

— Anaïs Nin

381. “A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.”

— Anaïs Nin

382. “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

383. “This image of herself as a not ordinary women, an image which was trembling now in his eyes, might suddenly disappear. Nothing more difficult to live up to than men’s dreams.”

— Anaïs Nin

384. “The unconscious can become destructive if it is disregarded and thwarted.”

— Anaïs Nin

385. “Poverty is the great reality. That is why the artist seeks it.”

— Anaïs Nin

386. “The shell is America’s most active contribution to the formation of character. A tough hide. Grow it early.”

— Anaïs Nin

387. “Innocence was gone from all our acts. Our habitual state of rebellion became a serious political crime.”

— Anaïs Nin

388. “This great handsomeness I took into myself later when he desired me, but I took it as one breathes air, or swallows a snowflake, or yields to the sun.”

— Anaïs Nin

389. “Analysis does not take into account the creative products of neurotic desires.”

— Anaïs Nin

390. “The way to recognize a dead word is that it exudes boredom.”

— Anaïs Nin

391. “Houses turn to corpses overnight when we cease to live and love in them.”

— Anaïs Nin

392. “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

393. “We love best those who are, or act for us, a self we do not wish to be or act out.”

— Anaïs Nin

394. “But the artist persists because he has the will to create, and this is the magic power which can transform and transfigure and transpose and which will ultimately be transmitted to others.”

— Anaïs Nin