Henry Miller Quotes

316 Sourced Quotes

For there is only one great adventure and that is inward toward the self, and for that, time nor space nor even deeds matter.

Henry Miller
Every man has his own destiny: the only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it leads him.

Henry Miller
In the beginning was the Word. Man acts it out. He is the act, not the actor.

Henry Miller
Side by side with the human race there runs another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists who, goaded by unknown impulses, take the lifeless mass of humanity and by the fever and ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the bread into wine and the wine into song.

Henry Miller
In the attempt to defeat death man has been inevitably obliged to defeat life, for the two are inextricably related. Life moves on to death, and to deny one is to deny the other.

Henry Miller
Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation. The other eight are unimportant.

Henry Miller
I see America spreading disaster. I see America as a black curse upon the world. I see a long night settling in and that mushroom which has poisoned the world withering at the roots.

Henry Miller
The only difference between the Adamic man and the man of today is that the one was born to Paradise and the other has to create it.

Henry Miller
There is nothing strange about fear: no matter in what guise it presents itself it is something with which we are all so familiar that when a man appears who is without it we are at once enslaved by him.

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

Henry Miller
It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir.

Henry Miller
What have we to offer the world beside the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the maniacal delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment?

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
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
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