Henry Miller Quotes

316 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble.

Henry Miller
There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of our time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves.

Henry Miller
The whole damn universe has to be taken apart, brick by brick, and reconstructed.

Henry Miller
One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.

Henry Miller
Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.

Henry Miller
Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

Henry Miller
I soon learned that one must give up everything and not do anything else but write, that one must write write write.

Henry Miller
I knew I wouldn't ever trade all this whirling about my head for Russia or heaven or anything on earth.

Henry Miller
All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.

Henry Miller
She was to me, and still is, the greatest person I have known - one who can truly be called a "devoted" soul. I owe her everything.

Henry Miller
To live without killing is a thought which could electrify the world, if men were only capable of staying awake long enough to let the idea soak in.

Henry Miller
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
I made up my mind that I would hold on to nothing, that I would expect nothing, that henceforth I would live as an animal, a beast of prey, a rover, a plunderer.

Henry Miller
For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood.

Henry Miller
What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.

Henry Miller
For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grace, it needs to be blown to smithereens.

Henry Miller