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

Henry Miller
I had no more need of God than He had of me, and if there were one, I often said to myself, I would meet Him calmly and spit in His face.

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
When you know what men are capable of you marvel neither at their sublimity nor their baseness. There are no limits in either direction apparently.

Henry Miller
All the men she's been with and now you, just you, and the barges going by, masts and hulls, the whole damned current of life flowing through you, through her, through all the guys behind you and after you, the flowers and the birds and the sun streaming in and the fragrance of it choking you, annihilating you.

Henry Miller
As far as history goes I am dead. If there is something beyond I shall have to bounce back. I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world which I have departed is a menagerie. The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If a am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself.

Henry Miller
A guy who's always interested in the condition of the world, and changing it, either has no problems of his own, or refuses to face them... not wanting to face things of his own nature.

Henry Miller
The world dies over and over again, but the skeleton always gets up and walks.

Henry Miller
Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Henry Miller
Topographically the country is magnificent - and terrifying. Why terrifying? Because nowhere else in the world is the divorce between man and nature so complete. Nowhere have I encountered such a dull, monotonous fabric of life as here in America. Here boredom reaches its peak.

Henry Miller
We don't trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation.

Henry Miller
Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middle-class men and woman who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will least forever or else are so frightened it won't, that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.

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
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
Real love is never perplexed, never qualifies, never rejects, never demands. It replenishes, by grace of restoring unlimited circulation. It burns, because it knows the true meaning of sacrifice. It is life illuminated.

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
France may one day exist no more, but the Dordogne will live on just as dreams live on and nourish the souls of men.

Henry Miller
There's nothing wrong with the world. What's wrong is our way of looking at it.

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

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
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