Top 519 Quotes & Sayings by Anais Nin - Page 2

If I love you it means we share the same fantasies, the same madnesses

The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.

I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits

You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too.

We are never trapped unless we choose to be.

Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.

Things aren't the way they are, they're the way you are

You live out the confusions until they become clear.

I want to do things so wild with you that I don't know how to say them.

I only believe in fire. Life. Fire. Being myself on fire I set others on fire. Never death. Fire and life.

The real wonders of life lie in the depths. Exploring the depths for truths is the real wonder which the child and the artist know: magic and power lie in truth.

The only transformer and alchemist that turns everything into gold is love. The only magic against death, aging, ordinary life, is love.

What everyone forgets is that passion is not merely a heightened sensual fusion but a way of life which produces, as in the mystics, an ecstatic awareness of the whole of life.

Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.

I believe the lasting revolution comes from deep changes in ourselves which influence our collective life.

For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds, and you and I both lose it in the same way, through love.

In chaos, there is fertility.

I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.

The artist is the only one who knows that the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements.

Experience teaches acceptance of the imperfect as life.

What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements.

willingness to explore everything is a sign of strength. The weak ones have prejudices. Prejudices are a protection.

I walk ahead of myself in perpetual expectancy of miracles.

When your beauty struck me, it dissolved me. Deep down, I am not different from you. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. I see in you that part of me which is you. I surrender my sincerity because if I love you it means we share the same fantasies, we share the same madness.

We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them.

Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go.

Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me. I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

We have been poisoned by fairy tales.

The secret of life was Breath. That was what I always wanted my words to do, to Breathe.

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.

There is a fissure in my vision and madness will always rush through.

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

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

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

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source.

We do not see the world as it is. We see the word as we are.

No one should be forced to carry the unfulfilled self of another.

From the backstabbing co-worker to the meddling sister-in-law, you are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made of layers, cells, constellations.

The self is merely the lens through which we see others and the world.

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 one's mind and psyche of yesterday. I throw away what has no dynamic, living use.

I don't tell the truth any more to those who can't make use of it. I tell it mostly to myself, because it always changes me.

Violence is a symptom of impotence.

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

We see things the way we are, not the way they are.

We are all engaged in the task of peeling off the false selves, the programmed selves, the selves created by our families, our culture, our religions. It is an enormous task because the history of women has been as incompletely told as the history of blacks.

I love your silences, they are like mine.

You are the only woman who ever answered the demands of my imagination.

The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation. Sex does not thrive on monotony. Without feeling, inventions, moods, no surprises in bed. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all of the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.

I am a winged creature who is too rarely allowed to use its wings. Ecstasies do not occur often enough.

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

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.

Compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity.

Write. Write until it stops hurting.

Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.

Your eyes make me shy

Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.

You fall in love with people's minds.

Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. And then love will come to you, then it comes to you.

You don't find love, it finds you. It's got a little bit to do with destiny, fate, and what's written in the stars.