Authors
Henry Miller Quotes
Best Quotes by Henry Miller (Top 10)
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The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough is love.
Henry Miller -
A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.
Henry Miller -
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.
Henry Miller -
I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.
Henry Miller -
The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.
Henry Miller -
Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such
Henry Miller -
One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.
Henry Miller -
I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.
Henry Miller -
The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.
Henry Miller -
If there is to be any peace it will come through being, not having.
Henry Miller
More Henry Miller Quotes
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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.
Henry Miller -
There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.
Henry Miller -
What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.
Henry Miller -
Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.
Henry Miller -
All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.
Henry Miller -
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.
Henry Miller -
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.
Henry Miller -
It is with the soul that we grasp the essence of another person, not with the mind, not even with the heart.
Henry Miller -
Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.
Henry Miller -
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."
Henry Miller -
Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation... The other eight are unimportant.
Henry Miller -
Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.
Henry Miller -
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.
Henry Miller -
True strength lies in submission which permits one to dedicate his life, through devotion, to something beyond himself.
Henry Miller -
An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.
Henry Miller -
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.
Henry Miller -
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.
Henry Miller -
Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring.
Henry Miller -
Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.
Henry Miller -
I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.
Henry Miller -
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.
Henry Miller -
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.
Henry Miller -
Everything hinges on how you look at things
Henry Miller -
Every man has his own destiny: the only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it leads him.
Henry Miller -
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.
Henry Miller -
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.
Henry Miller -
We create our fate every day . . . most of the ills we suffer from are directly traceable to our own behavior.
Henry Miller -
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.
Henry Miller -
If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms.
Henry Miller -
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.
Henry Miller -
We do not talk - we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests.
Henry Miller -
The real leader has no need to lead - he is content to point the way.
Henry Miller -
Until we accept the fact that life itself is founded in mystery, we shall learn nothing.
Henry Miller -
Example moves the world more than doctrine.
Henry Miller -
Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.
Henry Miller -
We create our fate everyday
Henry Miller -
Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.
Henry Miller -
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.
Henry Miller -
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.
Henry Miller -
Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.
Henry Miller -
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.
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 -
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.
Henry Miller -
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.
Henry Miller -
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.
Henry Miller -
What distinguishes the majority of men from the few is their ability to act according to their beliefs.
Henry Miller -
The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference.
Henry Miller -
What does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it?
Henry Miller -
Who hates the Jews more than the Jew?
Henry Miller -
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.
Henry Miller -
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.
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One of the reasons why so few of us ever act, instead of react, is because we are continually stifling our deepest impulses.
Henry Miller -
Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane.
Henry Miller -
It isn't the oceans which cut us off from the world - it's the American way of looking at things.
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 live at the edge of the miraculous.
Henry Miller -
Sin, guilt, neurosis; they are one and the same, the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
Henry Miller -
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.
Henry Miller -
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.
Henry Miller -
Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement.
Henry Miller