Top 100 Henry Miller Quotes
#1. In the attempt to defeat death man has been inevitably obliged to defeat life, for the two are inextricably related. Life moves on to death, and to deny one is to deny the other.
Henry Miller
#2. There are times when I myself no longer know whether I said and did the things I report or whether I dreamed them up. Anyway, I always dream true. If I lie a bit now and then it is mainly in the interest of truth.
Henry Miller
#3. The only difference between the Adamic man and the man of today is that the one was born to Paradise and the other has to create it.
Henry Miller
#4. Every so often I revolt, even against what I believe in with all my heart. I have to attack everything, myself included. Why? To simplify things.
Henry Miller
#5. It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir.
Henry Miller
#6. The word which gives the key to the national vice is waste. And people who are wasteful are not wise, neither can they remain young and vigorous. In order to transmute energy to higher and more subtle levels one must first conserve it.
Henry Miller
#7. Don't look for miracles. You yourself are the miracle.
Henry Miller
#8. There were lots of words which had fallen out of my vocabulary, living abroad so long.
Henry Miller
#9. It's beautiful to have a smoking jacket, a good cigar and a wife who plays the piano. So relaxing. So lenitive. Between the acts you go out for a smoke and a breath of fresh air.
Henry Miller
#10. America is no place for an artist: to be an artist is to be a moral leper, an economic misfit, a social liability. A corn-fed hog enjoys a better life than a creative writer, painter or musician. To be a rabbit is better still.
Henry Miller
#11. In every man's heart there is anchored a little schooner.
Henry Miller
#12. They were painfully clean. But inwardly they stank. Never once did they opened the door that leads to the soul; never once did they dream of taking a blind leap into the dark.
Henry Miller
#13. If you were married to a dipsomaniac, would you pretend that the mania for alcohol was perfectly harmless?
Henry Miller
#14. And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words?
Henry Miller
#15. When you travel often, you will be addicted to it forever.
Henry Miller
#16. What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.
Henry Miller
#17. The practice of any art demands more than 'mere savoir faire'. One must not only be in love with what one does, one must also know how to make love. In love self is obliterated. Only the beloved counts.
Henry Miller
#18. When a desperate, hungry spirit appears and makes the guinea pigs squeal it is because he knows where to put the live wire of sex, because he knows that beneath the hard carapace of indifference there is concealed the ugly gash, the wound that never heals.
Henry Miller
#19. One can sleep almost anywhere, but one must have a place to work. Even if it's not a masterpiece you're doing. Even a bad novel requires a chair to sit on and a bit of privacy.
Henry Miller
#20. This is the greatest damn thing about the universe. That we can know so much, recognize so much, dissect, do everything, and we can't grasp it.
Henry Miller
#21. It's like saying to a drowning man: What a pity, what a pity! If you had only let me teach you how to swim! Everybody wants to right the world, nobody wants help his neighbor. They want to make a man of you without taking your body into consideration. It's all cockeyed.
Henry Miller
#22. It is the obscene horror, the dry, fucked-out aspect of things which makes this crazy civilization look like a crater. It is this great yawning gulf of nothingness which the creative spirits and mothers of the race carry between their legs.
Henry Miller
#23. Remember that you're far back in the procession; remember that a whole army corps has laid siege to her, that she's been laid waste, plundered and pillaged.
Henry Miller
#25. Let us do our best, even if it gets us nowhere.
Henry Miller
#26. My policy has always been to burn my bridges behind me. My face is always set toward the future. If I make a mistake it is fatal. When I am flung back I fall all the way back - to the very bottom. My one safeguard is my resiliency. So far I have always bounced back.
Henry Miller
#27. No matter how attached I became to a 'cunt', I was always more interested in the person who owned it. A cunt doesn't live a separate, independent existence. Nothing does. Everything is interrelated.
Henry Miller
#28. Even if it doesn't work, there is something healthy and invigorating about direct action
Henry Miller
#29. This is not a book in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty ... what you will.
Henry Miller
#30. Let me be, was all I wanted. Be what I am, no matter how I am.
Henry Miller
#31. I made up my mind that I would hold onto nothing, that I would expect nothing.
Henry Miller
#32. One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.
Henry Miller
#33. But there was a streak in me, a perverse one, which prevented me from giving the essential self. This "perversity" always voiced itself thus: "Reveal your true self and they will mutilate you.
Henry Miller
#34. The prisoner is not the one who has commited a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over.
Henry Miller
#35. Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy; I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. What the general reader or the critic makes of them is not my concern.
Henry Miller
#36. The world around me is dissolving leaving here and there spots of time. The world is a cancer eating itself away.
Henry Miller
#37. Do not be duped by little duties. Do not be a chore man all your days.
Henry Miller
#38. If I am against the condition of the world, it is not because I am a moralist - it is because I want to laugh more.
Henry Miller
#39. He saw that science had become as great a hoax as religion, that nationalism was a farce, patriotism a fraud, education a form of leprosy, and that morals were for cannibals
Henry Miller
#40. The loss of sex polarity is part and parcel of the larger disintegration, the reflex of the soul's death, and coincident with the disappearance of great men, great deeds, great causes, great wars, etc.
Henry Miller
#41. He looks about the room at the few sticks of furniture, at the dirty bed sheets and the wash basin with the dirty water still in it, and he says: "I am a slave!" Every day he says it, not once, but a dozen times. And then he takes his guitar from the wall and sings.
Henry Miller
#42. There's something depraved about screwing a woman who doesn't give a fuck about it. It heats your blood ... " And then, after a moment's meditation - "Can you imagine what she'd be like if she had any feelings?
Henry Miller
#43. Instead of asking 'How much damage will the work in question bring about?' why not ask 'How much good? How much joy?'
Henry Miller
#44. Until he [man] has become fully human, until he learns to conduct himself as a member of the earth, he will continue to create gods who will destroy him. The tragedy of Greece lies not in the destruction of a great culture but in the abortion of a great vision.
Henry Miller
#45. And no one sets about saving the world unless he has first experienced the miracle of personal salvation.
Henry Miller
#46. True strength lies in submission which permits one to dedicate his life, through devotion, to something beyond himself.
Henry Miller
#47. We must be holy without holiness. We must be whole, complete. That's being holy. Any other kind of holiness is false, a snare, and a delusion.
Henry Miller
#48. It's terrible to be civilized, because when you come to the end of the world you have nothing to support the terror of loneliness.
Henry Miller
#49. The piano bar is the gateway to the halls of masturbation.
Henry Miller
#50. It has been that way ever since the Greeks - a blind fuck in the mud and then a quick spawn and then death.
Henry Miller
#51. Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.
Henry Miller
#52. The most wonderful opportunity which life offers is to be human.
Henry Miller
#53. Our world is rapidly drawing to a close; a new one is about to open. If it is to flourish it will have to rest on deeds as well as faith. The word will have to become flesh.
Henry Miller
#54. Moralities, ethics, laws, customs, beliefs, doctrines - these are of trifling import. All that matters is that the miraculous become the norm.
Henry Miller
#55. The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive.
Henry Miller
#56. If it be knowledge or wisdom one is seeking, then one had better go direct to the source. And the source is not the scholar or philosopher, not the master, saint, or teacher, but life itself - direct experience of life. The same is true for art. Here, too, we an dispense with the masters.
Henry Miller
#57. To love or be loved is no crime. the really criminal thing is to make a person believe that he or she is the only one you could ever love.
Henry Miller
#59. There is no progress: there is perpetual movement, displacement, which is circular, spiral, endless. Every man has his own destiny: the only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it lead him.
Henry Miller
#60. No, we are never alone. But one has to live apart to know it for the truth.
Henry Miller
#61. We ought to remind ourselves daily, repeat it like a litany, that in our being lies concealed the whole gamut of existence ... Above all, we should cease postponing the act of becoming what in fact and essence we are.
Henry Miller
#62. It was a crushing defeat, but it put iron in my backbone and sulphur in my blood. I knew at least what it was to fail. I knew what it was to attempt something big.
Henry Miller
#63. The most difficult thing to adjust to, apparently, is peace and contentment.
Henry Miller
#64. I have overspread the world like a syrup and the emptiness of it it's terrifying, but there is no dislodging the seed; the seed has become a little knot of cold fire which roars like a sun in the vast hollow of the dead carcass.
Henry Miller
#65. We have so many points in common that it is like looking at myself in a cracked mirror.
Henry Miller
#66. Her words imbued it with a peculiar fragrance; it was no longer just her private organ, but a treasure, a magic, potent treasure, a God-given thing
and none the less so because she traded it day and day out for a few pieces or silver.
Henry Miller
#67. What does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it?
Henry Miller
#68. Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.
Henry Miller
#69. I soon found out you can't change the world. The best you can do is to learn to live with it.
Henry Miller
#70. Even if one's whole life were a mistake, there is always time to change.
Henry Miller
#72. They died comfortably in their little bed of understanding, to become useful citizens of the world. I pitied them, and in short order I deserted them one by one, without the slightest regret.
Henry Miller
#73. One's destruction is never a place, but rather a new way of seeing things. (Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch)
Henry Miller
#74. We do not talk - we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests.
Henry Miller
#75. The real leader has no need to lead - he is content to point the way.
Henry Miller
#76. We have two American flags always: one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it means danger, revolution, anarchy.
Henry Miller
#77. To wander farther was to wander alone, to rely wholly upon oneself.
Henry Miller
#78. Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.
Henry Miller
#79. The only peace, the only security, is in fulfillment.
Henry Miller
#80. Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything godlike about God, it is that. He dared to imagine everything
Henry Miller
#81. He wakes up utterly bored and discomfited, chagrined to think that he did not die overnight.
Henry Miller
#82. I remember that just as I was about to cross the border they asked me what I had to declare and, like an idiot, I answered: I want to declare that I am a traitor to the human race.
Henry Miller
#83. Serenity is when you get above all this, when it doesn't matter what they think, say or want, but when you do as you are, and see God and Devil as one.
Henry Miller
#84. Acts are demanded, suicidal acts perhaps, but acts fraught with meaning.
Henry Miller
#85. Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation. The other eight are unimportant
Henry Miller
#86. Men are lonely and out of communication with one another because all their inventions speak only of death. Death is the automaton which rules the world of activity. Death is silent, because it has no mouth. Death has never expressed anything. Death is wonderful too
after life.
Henry Miller
#87. Through endless night the earth whirls toward a creation unknown ...
Henry Miller
#88. They never opened the door which leads to the soul.
Henry Miller
#89. Everything that belongs to the past seems to have fallen into the sea; I have memories, but the images have lost their vividness, they seem dead and desultory, like time - bitten mummies stuck in a quagmire.
Henry Miller
#90. Can you stop dead, and without thinking, radiate the truth which you know?
Henry Miller
#91. I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous man, the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the man in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable
Henry Miller
#93. No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.
Henry Miller
#94. The truly great writer does not want to write. He wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination.
Henry Miller
#95. I have made a silent compact with myself not to change a line of what I write. I am not interested in perfecting my thoughts, nor my actions.
Henry Miller
#96. Greece is the home of the gods; they may have died but their presence still makes itself felt. The gods were of human proportion: they were created out of the human spirit.
Henry Miller
#98. The goal of life is not to possess power but to radiate it.
Henry Miller
#99. Every time you come to the limit of what is demanded of you, you are faced with the same problem-to be yourself!
Henry Miller
#100. She may be lying in bed reading a book, she may be making love with a prize fighter, or she may be running like mad through a field of stubble, one shoe one, one shoe off, a man named Corn Cob pursuing her hotly. Wherever she is I am standing in complete darkness; her absence blots me out.
Henry Miller
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