Henry Miller Quotes

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

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

Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

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.

If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms.

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

The concert is a polite form of self induced torture.

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.

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.

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.

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

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don’t take it too seriously.

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

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

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

The legal system is often a mystery, and we, its priests, preside over rituals baffling to everyday citizens.

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.

We live at the edge of the miraculous.

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.

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

Man has demonstrated that he is master of everything except his own nature.

The real enemy can always be met and conquered, or won over. Real antagonism is based on love, a love which has not recognized itself.

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.

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

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.

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

Sin, guilt, neurosis; they are one and the same, the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Actors die so loud.

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.

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

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.

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.

In expanding the field of knowledge we but increase the horizon of ignorance.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement.

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

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

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

If I am against the condition of the world, it is not because I am a moralist – it is because I want to laugh more.