Henry Miller Quotes

316 Sourced Quotes

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
The history of the world is the history of a privileged few.

Henry Miller
Until we accept the fact that life itself is founded in mystery, we shall learn nothing.

Henry Miller
The full and joyful acceptance of the worst in oneself may be the only sure way of transforming it.

Henry Miller
The frantic desire to Live, to live at any cost, is not a result of the life rhythm in us, but of the death rhythm.

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
One of the reasons why so few of us ever act, instead of react, is because we are continually stifling our deepest impulses.

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

Henry Miller
The most wonderful opportunity which life offers is to be human.

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
Everything remains unsettled forever, depend on it.

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
Often, when following the trail which meanders over the hills, I pull myself up in an effort to encompass the glory and the grandeur which envelops the whole horizon. Often, when the clouds pile up in the north and the sea is churned with white caps, I say to myself: "This is the California that men dreamed of years ago, this is the Pacific that Balboa looked out on from the Peak of Darien, this is the face of the earth as the Creator intended it to look."

Henry Miller
Instead of asking 'How much damage will the work in question bring about?' why not ask 'How much good? How much joy?'

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
The old South was plowed under. But the ashes are still warm.

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
Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane.

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
At sixty-six I am more rebellious than I was at 16. Now I know the whole structure must topple, must be razed.

Henry Miller
I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object.

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

Henry Miller
The tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on my face. Thousands and thousands of us, and we're passing one another without a look of recognition.

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