The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.
Anais NinRead
And silence. She liked the silence most of all. The silence in which the body, senses, the instincts, are more alert, more powerful, more sensitized, live a more richly perfumed and intoxication life, instead of transmuting into thoughts, words, into exquisite abstractions, mathematics of emotion in place of violent impact, the volcanic eruptions of fever, lust and delight.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of silence in enhancing sensory experience and emotional intensity.
Anais Nin reflects on the value of silence as a state that allows a person to be more in tune with their body and instincts, suggesting that in silence, we experience life more vividly and intensely compared to being lost in abstract thoughts and emotions. It highlights the contrast between the richness of direct experience and the dilution of reality through overinterpretation or verbalization.
Themes
SilenceSensesExperienceEmotionIntensity
In practice
Example use cases
During a mindfulness retreat, I shared this quote to illustrate the benefits of quiet reflection.
More from Anais Nin
All quotes →Anxiety 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
Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruit in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between people, and their beliefs - in religion, literature, colleges and schools- democracy in all public and private life.
Walt WhitmanRead
There is but One God, His name is Truth, He is the Creator, He fears none, he is without hate, He never dies, He is beyond the cycle of births and death, He is self illuminated, He is realized by the kindness of the True Guru. He was True in the beginning, He was True when the ages commenced and has ever been True, He is also True now.
Guru NanakRead
Living is death; dying is life. We are not what we appear to be. On this side of the grave we are exiles, on that citizens; on this side orphans, on that children.
Henry Ward BeecherRead
I hope we shall . . . crush in [its] birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations.
Thomas JeffersonRead
All of us are citizens in a republic much larger than the Republic of America. It is the Republic of Letters, a realm of the mind that extends everywhere, without police, national boundaries, or disciplinary frontiers.
Robert DarntonRead
God is an unutterable sigh, planted in the depths of the soul.
Jean PaulRead