Henry Miller Quotes

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.

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

What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.

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

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

We have been educated to such a fine - or dull - point that we are incapable of enjoying something new, something different, until we are first told what it's all about. We don't trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation. In short, the blind lead the blind. It's the democratic 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.

It is with the soul that we grasp the essence of another person, not with the mind, not even with the heart.

Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.

No one asks you to throw Mozart out of the window. Keep Mozart. Cherish him. Keep Moses too, and Buddha and Lao Tzu and Christ. Keep them in your heart. But make room for the others, the coming ones, the ones who are already scratching on the window-panes."

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

Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.

It's good to be just plain happy, it's a little better to know that you're happy; but to understand that you're happy and to know why and how and still be happy, be happy in the being and the knowing, well that is beyond happiness, that is bliss.

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

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

Surely every one realizes, at some point along the way, that he is capable of living a far better life than the one he has chosen.

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.

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

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

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

Living apart and at peace with myself,I came to realize more vividly the meaning of the doctrine of acceptance. To refrain from giving advice, to refrain from meddling in the affairs of others, to refrain even though the motives be the highest, from tampering with anothers way of life-so simple, yet so difficult for an active spirit. Hands Off.

To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself.

Everything hinges on how you look at things

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

Who wants to be a hundred? What's the point of it? A short life and a merry one is far better than a long one sustained by fear, caution, and perpetual medical surveillance.

The world is not to be put in order. The world is order. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order.

We create our fate every day . . . most of the ills we suffer from are directly traceable to our own behavior.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Example moves the world more than doctrine.

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

We create our fate everyday

Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.

From the little reading I had done I had observed that the men who were most in life, who were molding life, who were life itself, ate little, slept little, owned little or nothing. They had no illusions about duty, or the perpetuation of their kith and kin, or the preservation of the State. They were interested in truth and in truth alone. They recognized only one kind of activity - creation.

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.

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 truly great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination. The first quivering word he puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain.

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

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 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.

The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference.

A new world is not made simply by trying to forget the old. A new world is made with a new spirit, with new values. Our world may have begun that way, but today it is caricature. Our world is a world of things. What we dread most, in the face of the impending debacle, is that we shall be obliged to give up our gewgaws, our gadgets, all the little comforts that have made us so uncomfortable. We are not peaceful souls; we are smug, timid, queasy and quaky.

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

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

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

Who hates the Jews more than the Jew?

One of the reasons why so few of us ever act, instead of react, is because we are continually stifling our deepest impulses.

The life of a creator is not the only life nor perhaps the most interesting which a man leads. There is a time for play and a time for work, a time for creation and a time for lying fallow. And there is a time, glorious too in its own way, when one scarcely exists, when one is a complete void. I mean-when boredom seems the very stuff of life.

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

We live at the edge of the miraculous.

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.

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.

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

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

Civilization is drugs, alcohol, engines of war, prostitution, machines and machine slaves, low wages, bad food, bad taste, prisons, reformatories, lunatic asylums, divorce, perversion, brutal sports, suicides, infanticide, cinema, quackery, demagogy, strikes, lockouts, revolutions, putsches, colonization, electric chairs, guillotines, sabotage, floods, famine, disease, gangsters, money barons, horse racing, fashion shows, poodle dogs, chow dogs, Siamese cats, condoms, peccaries, syphilis, gonorrhea, insanity, neuroses, etc., etc.

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.