Henry Miller's Quotes

What distinguishes the majority of men from the few is their ability to act according to their beliefs.

Actors die so loud.

I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.

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

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

Moralities, ethics, laws, customs, beliefs, doctrines - these are of trifling import. All that matters is that the miraculous become the norm.

The prisoner is not the one who has commited a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over.

The world is the mirror of myself dying.

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.

We live at the edge of the miraculous.

We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate.

What does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it?

What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.

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.

And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words?

Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.

It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.

It isn't the oceans which cut us off from the world - it's the American way of looking at things.

Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.

Plots and character don't make life. Life is here and now, anytime you say the word, anytime you let her rip.

The concert is a polite form of self induced torture.

The Teutons have been singing the swan song ever since they entered the ranks of history. They have always confounded truth with death.

The world dies over and over again, but the skeleton always gets up and walks.

The worst sin that can be committed against the artist is to take him at his word, to see in his work a fulfillment instead of an horizon.

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.

In this age, which believes that there is a short cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is, in the long run, the easiest.

One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.

Life is constantly providing us with new funds, new resources, even when we are reduced to immobility. In life's ledger there is no such thing as frozen assets.

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.

I have never been able to look upon America as young and vital but rather as prematurely old, as a fruit which rotted before it had a chance to ripen.

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.

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.

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.

Los Angeles gives one the feeling of the future more strongly than any city I know of. A bad future, too, like something out of Fritz Lang's feeble imagination.

When one is trying to do something beyond his known powers it is useless to seek the approval of friends. Friends are at their best in moments of defeat.

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.

No matter how vast, how total, the failure of man here on earth, the work of man will be resumed elsewhere. War leaders talk of resuming operations on this front and that, but man's front embraces the whole universe.

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.

The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive.

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.

The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough is love.

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.

An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.

Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.

If there is to be any peace it will come through being, not having.

Back of every creation, supporting it like an arch, is faith. Enthusiasm is nothing: it comes and goes. But if one believes, then miracles occur.

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.

I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.

The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.

Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring.

All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.

Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.

Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.

Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.

We do not talk - we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests.

One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.

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

There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.

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

The only thing we never get enough of is love; and the only thing we never give enough of is love.

The real leader has no need to lead - he is content to point the way.

If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.

No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.

Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.

Why are we so full of restraint? Why do we not give in all directions? Is it fear of losing ourselves? Until we do lose ourselves there is no hope of finding ourselves.

Problems are only opportunities with thorns on them.

Life itself is a school, and Nature always a fresh study.

But the advice was not taken - Johnstone did emigrate to Canada, and did mortgage his pension; and I fear - though I failed to trace his after history - that he suffered in consequence.

Donald had reached its further edge, and could hear the rush of the stream from the deep obscurity of the abyss below, when there rose from the opposite side a strain of the most delightful music he had ever heard.

Save for thee and thy lessons, man in society would everywhere sink into a sad compound of the fiend and the wild beast; and this fallen world would be as certainly a moral as a natural wilderness.

Their humble dwellings were of their own rearing; it was they themselves who had broken in their little fields; from time immemorial, far beyond the reach of history, had they possessed their mountain holdings.

They were, I doubt not, happy enough in their dark stalls, because they were horses, and had plenty to eat; and I was at times quite happy enough in the dark loft, because I was a man, and could think and imagine.