"Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves."
Read quote
8 likes
Quote collection
Anais Nin quotes (page 11 of 26)
520 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically."
Read quote
8 likes
"The suppression of inner patterns in favor of patterns created by society is dangerous to us."
Read quote
8 likes
"I don't wish power, only art -art and passion."
Read quote
8 likes
"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."
Read quote
8 likes
"I adore the struggle you carry in yourself. I adore your terrifying sincerity."
Read quote
8 likes
"The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself."
Read quote
8 likes
"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."
Read quote
8 likes
"The unknown was my compass. The unknown was my encyclopedia. The unnamed was my science and progress."
Read quote
8 likes
"It is possible I never learned the names of birds in order to discover the bird of peace, the bird of paradise, the bird of the soul, the bird of desire. It is possible I avoided learning the names of composers and their music the better to close my eyes and listen to the mystery of all music as an ocean. It may be I have not learned dates in history in order to reach the essence of timelessness. It may be I never learned geography the better to map my own routes and discover my own lands. The unknown was my compass. The unknown was my encyclopedia. The unnamed was my science and progress."
Read quote
8 likes
"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."
Read quote
8 likes
"You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living."
Read quote
8 likes
"What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?"
Read quote
8 likes
"I miss the animal buoyancy of New York, the animal vitality. I did not mind that it had no meaning and no depth."
Read quote
8 likes
"[in the]..curious way that my idealism has been mixed with my fatalism, so that I can possess the soul of a dreamer and that of a cynic at the same time......I possess a power of magic...[to] destroy the balance of a well-designed destiny with my diabolical mind."
Read quote
8 likes
"The man who was once starved may revenge himself upon the world not by stealing just once, or by stealing only what he needs, but by taking from the world an endless toll in payment of something irreplaceable, which is the lost faith."
Read quote
8 likes
"We celebrate peace. Yet we pay no attention to the ways of curing aggression in human beings. And when one sees in psychoanalysis hostility disappearing as people conquer their fears, one wonders if the cure is not there."
Read quote
8 likes
"Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning."
Read quote
8 likes
"The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility."
Read quote
8 likes
"The ivory tower of the artist may be the only stronghold left for human values, cultural treasures, man’s cult of beauty."
Read quote
8 likes