Henry Miller Quotes

316 Sourced Quotes

Your whole past is like a long sleep which would have been forgotten had there been no memory, but remembrance is there in the blood and the blood is like an ocean in which everything is washed away but that which is new and more substantial even than life - reality.

Henry Miller
Remorse is impotence; it will sin again. Only repentance is strong - it can end everything.

Henry Miller
The life of a creator is not the only life nor perhaps the most interesting which a man leads. There is a time for play and a time for work, a time for creation and a time for lying fallow. And there is a time, glorious too in its own way, when one scarcely exists, when one is a complete void. I mean-when boredom seems the very stuff of life.

Henry Miller
The word civilization to my mind is coupled with death. When I use the word, I see civilization as a crippling, thwarting thing, a stultifying thing. For me it was always so. I don't believe in the golden ages, you see... civilization is the arteriosclerosis of culture.

Henry Miller
New York has a trip-hammer vitality which drives you insane with restlessness if you have no inner stabilizer.

Henry Miller
Think only what is right there, what is right under your nose to do. It's such a simple thing - that's why people can't do it.

Henry Miller
Surrealism is merely the reflection of the death process. It is one of the manifestations of a life becoming extinct, a virus which quickens the inevitable end.

Henry Miller
I had to learn to think, feel, and see in a totally new fashion, in an uneducated way, in my own way, which is the hardest thing in the world. I had to throw myself into the current, knowing that I would probably sink.

Henry Miller
Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. The adventure is a metaphysical one: it is a way of approaching life indirectly, of acquiring a total rather than a partial view of the universe. The writer lives between the upper and lower worlds: he takes the path in order eventually to become the path himself.

Henry Miller
Many is the mirage I chased. Always I was overreaching myself. The oftener I touched reality, the harder I bounced back to the world of illusion, which is the name for everyday life.

Henry Miller
Even if one's whole life were a mistake, there is always time to change.

Henry Miller
The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself. All that you despise, all that you loathe, all that you reject, all that you condemn and seek to convert by punishment springs from you.

Henry Miller
I thought, when I came upon her, that I was seizing hold of life... Instead I lost hold of life completely. I reached out for something to attach myself to - and I found nothing. But in reaching out, in the effort to grasp, to attach myself, left high and dry as I was, I nevertheless found something I had not looked for - myself.

Henry Miller
Life, as we all know, is conflict, and man, being part of life, is himself an expression of conflict. If he recognizes the fact and accepts it, he is apt, despite the conflict, to know peace and to enjoy it. But to arrive at this end, which is only a beginning (for we haven't begun to live yet!), a man has got to learn the doctrine of acceptance, that is, of unconditional surrender, which is love.

Henry Miller
For the artist to attach himself to his work, or identify himself with it, is suicidal.

Henry Miller
All my Calvaries were rosy crucifixions, pseudo-tragedies to keep the fires of hell burning brightly for the real sinners who are in danger of being forgotten.

Henry Miller
'Life', said Emerson, "consists in what a man is thinking all day." If that be so, then my life is nothing but a big intestine.

Henry Miller
The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal.

Henry Miller
I believe in saying the truth, coming out with it cold, shocking if necessary, not disguising it.

Henry Miller
The world is what it is and I am what I am.... This out there and this in me, all this, everything, the resultant of inexplicable forces. A Chaos whose order is beyond comprehension. Beyond human comprehension.

Henry Miller
There is only one thing which interests me vitally now, and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books

Henry Miller
After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

Henry Miller
If you can fall in love again and again if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical you've got it half licked.

Henry Miller
Man has demonstrated that he is master of everything - except his own nature.

Henry Miller
I wanted to die; I wanted to surrender because I saw no sense in struggling. I felt that nothing would be proved, substantiated, added or subtracted by continuing an existence which I had not asked for.

Henry Miller
All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet - if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

Henry Miller
The moment one is on the side of life; peace and security drop out of consciousness. The only peace, the only security, is in fulfillment.

Henry Miller
Words, sentences, ideas, no matter how subtle or ingenious, the maddest flights of poetry, the most profound dreams, the most hallucinating visions, are but crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain and sorrow to commemorate an event which is untransmissible.

Henry Miller
It is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis.

Henry Miller
The more I wrote, the more I became a human being. The writing may have seemed monstrous (to some) for it was a violation, but I became a more human individual because of it. I was getting the poison out of my system.

Henry Miller