Henry Miller Quotes

316 Sourced Quotes

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
I have made a silent compact with myself not to change a line of what I write. I am not interested in perfecting my thoughts, nor my actions.

Henry Miller
Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

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

Henry Miller
Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy.

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

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

Henry Miller
Serenity is when you get above all this, when it doesn't matter what they think, say or want, but when you do as you are, and see God and Devil as one.

Henry Miller
The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary.

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom. I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, i thought I was an artist. I no longer think about it. I am. There are no more books to be written, thank God.

Henry Miller
I venerate van Gogh. He was a remarkable human being, a man who knew about love. His work reflects a spirit filled with light, even though his life was a tragedy in many ways.

Henry Miller
That we cannot rise equal to situations when we are in them — that is the tragedy of life.

Henry Miller
The man who is forever disturbed about the condition of humanity either has no problems of his own or has refused to face them.

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

Henry Miller
The capital of the new planet—the one, I mean, which will kill itself off—is of course Detroit.

Henry Miller
It is true I swim in a perpetual sea of sex but the actual excursions are fairly limited.

Henry Miller
Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil.

Henry Miller
The smile was so painfully swift and fleeting that it was like the flash of a knife.

Henry Miller
True strength lies in submission which permits one to dedicate his life, through devotion, to something beyond himself.

Henry Miller