Henry Miller Quotes

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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.

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

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.

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

The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.

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

We live at the edge of the miraculous.

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

Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The world is the mirror of myself dying.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

Analysis brings no curative powers in its train; it merely makes us conscious of the existence of an evil, which, oddly enough, is consciousness.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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 440 horsepower in a 2-cylinder engine.

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.

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

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

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

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

The concert is a polite form of self induced torture.

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

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

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

One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.

Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Actors die so loud.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order.

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.

We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets - we remember only.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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