Henry Miller Quotes

316 Sourced Quotes

Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.

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
We do not talk—we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines, and digests.

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

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

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

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

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

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 Happiest peoples, it is said, are those which have no history. Those who have a history, those who have made history seem only to have emphazied through their acomplishments the eternality of struggle. These disappear too eventually, just as those who made no effort, who were content to merely live & enjoy.

Henry Miller
Her fluency was marvelous. She would say things at random, intricate, flamelike, or slide off into a parenthetical limbo peppered with fireworks— admirable linguistic feats which a practiced writer might struggle for hours to achieve.

Henry Miller
The bulk of my readers, I have often observed, fall into two distinct groups: in the one group those who claim to be repelled or disgusted by the liberal dosage of sex, and in the other those who are delighted to find that this element forms such a large ingredient.

Henry Miller
For the moment I can think of nothing— except that I am a sentient being stabbed by the miracle of these waters that reflect a forgotten world.

Henry Miller
A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in....

Henry Miller
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
Vlaminck and Utrillo were very good friends, drinking buddies. One day they attend a funeral. They're walking behind the hearse in a procession, and they're having a great time conversing with one another. They are completely engrossed when suddenly one asks the other, 'Say, don't you smell something funny?' They look up and they're walking behind a garbage truck! They'd lost the hearse in the middle of their enthusiastic conversation.

Henry Miller
Perhaps the artist is nothing more than the personification of this universal maladjustment, this universal disequilibrium.

Henry Miller
When you are convinced that all the exits are blocked, either you take to believing in miracles or you stand still like the hummingbird. The miracle is that the honey is always there, right under your nose, only you were too busy searching elsewhere to realize it. The worst is not death but being blind, blind to the fact that everything about life is in the nature of the miraculous.

Henry Miller
I found that what I had desired all my life was not to live - if what others are doing is called living - but to express myself.

Henry Miller
Sin, guilt, neurosis—they are one and the same, the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

Henry Miller
The neurotic is the flounder that lies on the bed of the river, securely settled in the mud, waiting to be speared. For him death is the only certainty, and the dread of that grim certainty immobilizes him.

Henry Miller