Authors Public Collections Topics My Collections

Quotes by Anais Nin

Anais Nin

To change skins evolve into new cycles I feel one has to learn to discard. If one changes internally one should not continue to live with the same objects. They reflect ones mind and psyche of yesterday. I throw away what has no dynamic living use.

One must be thrust out of a finished cycle in life and that leap is the most difficult to make-to part with ones faith ones love when one would prefer to renew the faith and recreate the passion.

When you make a world tolerable for yourself you make a world tolerable for others.

Each friend represents a world in us a world possibly not born until they arrive and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

[Families] are made to make you forget yourself occasionally so that the beautiful balance of life is not destroyed.

What I cannot love I overlook.

I cannot concentrate all my friendship on any single one of my friends because no one is complete enough in himself.

I will not be just a tourist in the world of images just watching images passing by which I cannot live in make love to possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we dont know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds it dies of weariness of withering of tarnishing.

Violence is a symptom of impotence.

I was thinking of my patients and how the worst moment for them was when they discovered they were masters of bad or good luck. When they could no longer blame fate they were in despair.

I dont tell the truth any more to those who cant make use of it. I tell it mostly to myself because it always changes me.

She lacks confidence she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not dare to be herself.

I postpone death by living by suffering by error by risking by giving by losing.

When one is pretending the entire body revolts.

Beware of allowing a tactless word rebuttal a rejection to obliterate the whole sky.

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.

There are very few human beings who receive the truth complete and staggering by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment on a small scale by successive developments cellularly like a laborious mosaic.

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

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene and as if by magic we see a new meaning in it.