Anaïs Nin Quotes

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.

When one is pretending the entire body revolts.

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.

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

There were always in me two women at least one woman desperate and bewildered who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene as upon a stage conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses helplessness despair and present to the world only a smile an eagerness curiosity enthusiasm interest.

Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.

Warmth, perfume, rugs, soft lights, books. They do not appease me. I am aware of time passing, of all the world contains that I have not seen, of all the interesting people I have not met.

There is a resemblance between men and women, not a contrast. When a man begins to recognize his feeling, the two unite. When men accept the sensitive side of themselves, they come alive.