The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.
Anais NinRead
Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote highlights the value of introspection over societal pressures to conform to extroverted ideals.
Anais Nin's quote emphasizes the importance of the inner journey and self-discovery in a culture that prioritizes extroverted behaviors and values. By discouraging this inward exploration, society has led individuals to lose their sense of self or 'center,' which they must now strive to rediscover in order to achieve true fulfillment and understanding.
Themes
CultureIntrospectionSelf-DiscoveryExtroversionInner Journey
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion on mental health, one might use this quote to advocate for the importance of self-reflection.
More from Anais Nin
All quotes βAnxiety is love's greatest killer, because it is like the stranglehold of the drowning.
Anais NinRead
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.
Anais NinRead
The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it. I will work, I will love my husband, but I will fulfill myself.
Anais NinRead
We have been poisoned by fairy tales.
Anais NinRead
But I lie. I embellish. My words are not deep enough. They disguise, they conceal. I will not rest until I have told of my descent into a sensuality which was as dark, as magnificent, as wild, as my moments of mystic creation have been dazzling, ecstatic, exalted.
Anais NinRead
Similar quotes
To be with God is really to be involved in some enormous, overwhelming desire, and joy, and power which you cannot control, which controls you.
James A. BaldwinRead
Many introverts feel there's something wrong with them, and try to pass as extroverts. But whenever you try to pass as something you're not, you lose a part of yourself along the way. You especially lose a sense of how to spend your time.
Susan CainRead
The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It's a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters.
J. G. BallardRead
I suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being on a young soul to which they are totally unfit. Cannot we let people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make that man another you. One's enough.
Ralph Waldo EmersonRead
For the past several years, I have remained what others would consider underground. I did this in order to build a community of people, like-minded in their desire for freedom and the right to pursue their goals and lives without being manipulated and controlled by a media protected military industrial complex with a completely different agenda.
Lauryn HillRead
The fact that we're all here in these bodies means that we're not perfected.
George HarrisonRead