Henry Miller Quotes

316 Sourced Quotes

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
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
What is an artist? He's a man who has antennae, who knows how to hook up to the currents which are in atmosphere, in the cosmos.

Henry Miller
But you can't put fight into a man's guts if he hasn't any fight in him. There are some of us so cowardly that you can't ever make heroes of us, not even if you frighten us to death. We know too much, maybe. There are some of us who don't live in the moment, who live a little ahead, or a little behind.

Henry Miller
The most difficult thing to adjust to, apparently, is peace and contentment.

Henry Miller
To paint is to love again, and to love is to live life to the fullest.

Henry Miller
Understanding is not a piercing of the mystery, but an acceptance of it, a living blissfully with it, in it, through and by it.

Henry Miller
For one crime which is expiated in prison ten thousand are committed thoughtlessly by those who condemn.

Henry Miller
I will never again go to people under false pretenses even if it is to give them the Holy Bible. I will never again sell anything, even if I have to starve. I am going home now and I will sit down and really write about people.

Henry Miller
To be cured, we must rise from our graves and throw off the cerements of the dead. Nobody can do it for another - it is a private affair which is best done collectively. We must die as egos and be born again in the swarm, not separated and self-hypnotized, but individual and related.

Henry Miller
I am positively against all this crap which is carried on first in the name of this thing, then in the name of that. I believe only in what is active, immediate, and personal.

Henry Miller
I demanded a realm in which I should be both master and slave at the same time: The world of art is the only such realm.

Henry Miller
We should not stop to reflect, compare, analyze, possess, but flow on and through, endlessly, like music.

Henry Miller
There are lone figures armed only with ideas, sometimes with just one idea, who blast away whole epochs in which we are enwrapped like mummies. Some are powerful enough to resurrect the dead. Some steal on us unawares and put a spell over us which it takes centuries to throw off. Some put a curse on us, for our st idity and inertia, and then it seems as if God himself were unable to lift it.

Henry Miller
The enchanting, and sometimes terrifying, thing is that the world can be so many things to so many different souls. That it can be, and is, all these things at once and the same time.

Henry Miller
All the lies and evasions by which man has nourished himself civilization, in a word is the fruits of the creative artist. It is the creative nature of man which has refused to let him lapse back into that unconscious unity with life which characterizes the animal world from which he made his escape.

Henry Miller
If the poet can no longer speak for society, but only for himself, then we are at the last ditch.

Henry Miller
At Epidaurus, in the stillness, in the great peace that came over me, I heard the heart of the world beat. I know what the cure is: it is to give up, to relinquish, to surrender, so that our little hearts may beat in unison with the great heart of the world.

Henry Miller
The learning we received only tended to obscure our vision. From the day we went to school we learned nothing; on the contrary, we were made obtuse, we were wrapped in a fog of words and abstractions.

Henry Miller
Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain illusions. It's a sort of spiritual clap, I should say.

Henry Miller
The man who is intoxicated with life does not pass judgment, does not seek to come to a conclusion, does not impose his message on the world.

Henry Miller
To the man whose senses are alive and alert there is not even the need to stir from one's threshold.

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

Henry Miller
When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written.

Henry Miller
We must be holy without holiness. We must be whole, complete. That's being holy. Any other kind of holiness is false, a snare, and a delusion.

Henry Miller
The word which gives the key to the national vice is waste. And people who are wasteful are not wise, neither can they remain young and vigorous. In order to transmute energy to higher and more subtle levels one must first conserve it.

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

Henry Miller