Henry Miller Quotes

316 Sourced Quotes

Whenever a taboo is broken, something good happens, something vitalizing... Taboos after all are only hangovers, the product of diseased minds, you might say, of fearsome people who hadn't the courage to live and who under the guise of morality and religion have imposed these things upon us.

Henry Miller
He saw that science had become as great a hoax as religion, that nationalism was a farce, patriotism a fraud, education a form of leprosy, and that morals were for cannibals

Henry Miller
What I want is to open up. I want to know what's inside me. I want everybody to open up. I'm like an imbecile with a can opener in his hand, wondering where to begin— to open up the earth. I know that underneath the mess everything is marvelous. I'm sure of it.

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
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
The loss of sex polarity is part and parcel of the larger disintegration, the reflex of the soul's death, and coincident with the disappearance of great men, great deeds, great causes, great wars, etc.

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

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