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Quotes from Diary entries — Anaïs Nin

1903–1977 France

← All quotes by Anaïs Nin

54 quotes

I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.

Diary entries (1914)

Love is the axis and breath of my life. The art I produce is a byproduct, an excrescence of love, the song I sing, the joy which must explode, the overabundance — that is all!

Diary entries (1914)

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

Diary entries (1914)

In creation alone there is the possibility of perfection.

Diary entries (1914)

Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.

Diary entries (1914)

Ecstasy is the moment of exaltation from wholeness!

Diary entries (1914)

To lie, of course, is to engender insanity.

Diary entries (1914)

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

Diary entries (1914)

The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest.

Diary entries (1914)

When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.

Diary entries (1914)

I would say that compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity.

Diary entries (1914)

No desire of the body, but for what lies in there, what lies in the flesh, the world, the thought, the creation, the illumination.

Diary entries (1914)

Love reduces the complexity of living.

Diary entries (1914)

The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.

Diary entries (1914)

The times in his studio when he washed his hands and they smoked, for his hands were so warm and the water so cold.

Diary entries (1914)

I say quotations are literary. They are good only when dealing with ideas, not with experience. Experience should be pure, unique.

Diary entries (1914)

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.

Diary entries (1914)

He left me at my hotel at 3:00 AM murmuring: "You're marvelous."

Diary entries (1914)

Everything but happiness is neurosis.

Diary entries (1914)

I had always believed in Andre Breton's freedom, to write as one thinks, in the order and disorder in which one feels in thinks, to follow sensations and absurd correlations of events and images, to trust to the new realms they lead one into. "The cult of the marvelous."

Diary entries (1914)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Anaïs Nin (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.