Anais Nin Quotes

Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.

Everything but happiness is neurosis.

I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me.

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

His life rushes onward in such torrential rhythm that...only angels and devils can catch the tempo of it.

I am like a snake who has already bitten. I retreat from a direct battle while knowing the slow effect of the poison.

Write. Write until it stops hurting.

My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.

The creative personality never remains fixed on the first world it discovers. It never resigns itself to anything.

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

My life is slowed up by thought and the need to understand what I am living.

When one is pretending the entire body revolts.

Every individual is representative of the whole . . . and should be intimately understood, and this would give a far greater understanding of mass movements and sociology.

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.

I sleep with my feet on moss carpets, my branches in the cotton of the clouds.

Now that I am moving, I am afraid. Where am I going?

We are cruel when someone refuses to play the role in which we have cast him. We judge a person only according to his relationship towards us.

Introspection is a devouring monster. You have to feed it with much material, much experience, many people, many places, many loves, many creations, and then it ceases feeding on you.

I don't mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated

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

Love men and women not for their strength but their softness, not for their fullness but their hunger, not for their plenty but their need.

A war regarded as inevitable or even probable, and therefore much prepared for, has a very good chance of eventually being fought.

The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation.

What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?

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

The risk it takes to remain tight inside the bud is more painful than the risk it takes to blossom. We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

When I cannot bear outer pressures anymore, I begin to put order in my belongings...As if unable to organize and control my life, I seek to exert this on the world of objects.

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

Your strength is soft, indirect, delicate, tender, womanly. But it is strength just the same.

I miss the animal buoyancy of New York, the animal vitality. I did not mind that it had no meaning and no depth.

Convalescence. Such an utter weakness that you lie like an animal hibernating, playing possum. You float. You are adrift. Every current is stronger than you.

You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living.

The unknown was my compass. The unknown was my encyclopedia. The unnamed was my science and progress.

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.

I adore the struggle you carry in yourself. I adore your terrifying sincerity.

When I am most deeply rooted, I feel the wildest desire to uproot myself.

I don't wish power, only art -art and passion.

I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically.

Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.

The suppression of inner patterns in favor of patterns created by society is dangerous to us.

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

I despise my own hypersensitiveness, which requires so much reassurance. It is certainly abnormal to crave so much to be loved and understood.

Tropical nights are hammocks for lovers.

Balance is not to be sought by association with others; it must exist within one's self.

The bed must be a beautiful place, not only because you make love there but because you dream there as well.

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

We don't have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds.

Introspection is a devouring monster.

Jazz is the music of the body.

Compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity.