Henry Miller Quotes

316 Sourced Quotes

Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring, through obeying the blind urge.

Henry Miller
One's destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.

Henry Miller
If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms.

Henry Miller
I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.

Henry Miller
Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.

Henry Miller
The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.

Henry Miller
Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.

Henry Miller
The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference.

Henry Miller
The monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses.

Henry Miller
I venerate van Gogh. He was a remarkable human being, a man who knew about love. His work reflects a spirit filled with light, even though his life was a tragedy in many ways.

Henry Miller
That we cannot rise equal to situations when we are in them — that is the tragedy of life.

Henry Miller
The man who is forever disturbed about the condition of humanity either has no problems of his own or has refused to face them.

Henry Miller
Writing is Crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain & sorrow to commemorate an event which is intransmissible.

Henry Miller
The capital of the new planet—the one, I mean, which will kill itself off—is of course Detroit.

Henry Miller
It is true I swim in a perpetual sea of sex but the actual excursions are fairly limited.

Henry Miller
Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil.

Henry Miller
The smile was so painfully swift and fleeting that it was like the flash of a knife.

Henry Miller
True strength lies in submission which permits one to dedicate his life, through devotion, to something beyond himself.

Henry Miller
Whenever a taboo is broken, something good happens, something vitalizing... Taboos after all are only hangovers, the product of diseased minds, you might say, of fearsome people who hadn't the courage to live and who under the guise of morality and religion have imposed these things upon us.

Henry Miller
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
What I want is to open up. I want to know what's inside me. I want everybody to open up. I'm like an imbecile with a can opener in his hand, wondering where to begin— to open up the earth. I know that underneath the mess everything is marvelous. I'm sure of it.

Henry Miller
Every man is working out his destiny in his own way and nobody can be of any help except by being kind, generous, and patient.

Henry Miller
The world isn't kept running because it's a paying proposition, the world goes on because a few men in every generation believe in it utterly, accept it unquestioningly; they underwrite it with their lives.

Henry Miller
I have never once thought of work in connection with Mobile. Not anybody working.

Henry Miller
The city is loveliest when the sweet death racket begins. Her own life lived in defiance of nature, her electricity, her frigidaires, her soundproof walls, the glint of lacquered nails, the plumes that wave across the corrugated sky. Here in the coffin depths grow the everlasting flowers sent by telegraph.

Henry Miller
I feel that America is essentially against the artist, that the enemy of America is the artist, because he stands for individuality and creativeness, and that's un-American somehow.

Henry Miller
How different the new order would be if we could consult the veteran instead of the politician.

Henry Miller
The sordid qualities imputed to the enemy are always those which we recognize as our own and therefore rise to slay, because only through projection do we realize the enormity and horror of them.

Henry Miller
Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.

Henry Miller
It is no accident that propels people like us to Paris. Paris is simply an artificial stage, a revolving stage that permits the spectator to glimpse all phases of the conflict. Of itself Paris initiates no dramas. They are begun elsewhere. Paris is simply an obstetrical instrument that tears the living embryo from the womb and puts it in the incubator.

Henry Miller