Henry Miller famous quotes

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

#Happiness #Spiritual #Peace

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

#Integrity #Commitment #Acceptance

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

#Heart #Sunshine #Silence

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.
-- Henry Miller

#Inspirational #Lying #Book

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

#Gratitude #Time #Perspective

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

#Inspirational #Courage #Dark

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

#Inspirational #Life #Beauty

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

#Inspirational #Progress #Adaptation

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

#Music #Lonely #Loneliness

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

#Fear #Inspiration #Giving

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

#Motivational #Beauty #Gratitude

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

#Life #Happiness #Success

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

#Beauty #Music #Beautiful

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

#Hero #Men #Differences

Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.
-- Henry Miller

#Reality #Chaos #Score

To have her here in bed with me, breathing on me, her hair in my mouth—I count that something of a miracle.
-- Henry Miller

#Sex #Hair #Breathing

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

#Expression #Growth #Decay

By choosing to live above the ordinary level we create extraordinary problems for ourselves.
-- Henry Miller

#Ordinary #Levels #Problem

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

#Faith #Believe #Miracle

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

#Mean #Two #Society

He saw that science had become as great a hoax as religion, that nationalism was a farce, patriotism a fraud, education a form of leprosy, and that morals were for cannibals
-- Henry Miller

#Leprosy #Saws #Hoaxes

What have we to offer the world beside the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the maniacal delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment?
-- Henry Miller

#Enlightenment #Progress #Insane

It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom. I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, i thought I was an artist. I no longer think about it. I am. There are no more books to be written, thank God.
-- Henry Miller

#Book #Fall #Men

The essential thing is to WANT to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.
-- Henry Miller

#Song #Singing #Essentials

We create our fate everyday
-- Henry Miller

#Fate #Destiny #Everyday

Side by side with the human race there runs another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists who, goaded by unknown impulses, take the lifeless mass of humanity and by the fever and ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the bread into wine and the wine into song.
-- Henry Miller

#Running #Song #Wine

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

#Fate #Training #Suffering

What seems nasty, painful, evil can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind.
-- Henry Miller

#Evil #Joy #Mind

I made up my mind that I would hold onto nothing, that I would expect nothing.
-- Henry Miller

#Mind #Expect Nothing #Made

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

#Order #Giving #Redemption

either you take in believing in miracles or you stand still like the hummingbird.
-- Henry Miller

#Believe #Miracle #Hummingbirds

I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object.
-- Henry Miller

#Eye #Sole #Grain

I want to undress you, vulgarize you a bit.
-- Henry Miller

#Sex #Want

Through endless night the earth whirls toward a creation unknown...
-- Henry Miller

#Night #Earth #Creation

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.
-- Henry Miller

#Ideas #People #Sake

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.
-- Henry Miller

#Life #Frozen #Assets

It is with the soul that we grasp the essence of another human being, not with the mind, nor even with the heart.
-- Henry Miller

#Heart #Essence #Soul

What I want is to open up. I want to know what's inside me. I want everybody to open up. I'm like an imbecile with a can opener in his hand, wondering where to begin-- to open up the earth. I know that underneath the mess everything is marvelous. I'm sure of it.
-- Henry Miller

#Hands #Earth #Want

Let me be, was all I wanted. Be what I am, no matter how I am.
-- Henry Miller

#Life #Matter #Let Me

Serenity is when you get above all this, when it doesn't matter what they think, say or want, but when you do as you are, and see God and Devil as one.
-- Henry Miller

#Thinking #Serenity #Devil

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

#Way #Realizing #Better Life

The earth is not a lair, neither is it a prison. The earth is a Paradise, the only one we'll ever know. We will realize it the moment we open our eyes. We don't have to make it a Paradise-it is one. We have only to make ourselves fit to inhabit it. The man with the gun, the man with murder in his heart, cannot possibly recognize Paradise even when he is shown it.
-- Henry Miller

#Eye #Heart #Men

...when you are convinced that all the exits are blocked, either you take to believing in miracles or you stand still like the hummingbird. The miracle is that the honey is always there, right under your nose, only you were too busy searching elsewhere to realize it. The worst is not death but being blind, blind to the fact that everything about life is in the nature of the miraculous.
-- Henry Miller

#Believe #Miracle #Honey

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation... A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold.
-- Henry Miller

#Lying #Book #Mind

New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves... A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness. Meaningless. Absolute meaningless.
-- Henry Miller

#New York #Jobs #Thug

Out yonder they may curse, revile, and torture one another, defile all the human instincts, make a shambles of creation (if it were in their power), but here, no, here, it is unthinkable, here there is abiding peace, the peace of God, and the serene security created by a handful of good neighbors living at one with the creature world.
-- Henry Miller

#Peace #World #May

People are like lice - they get under your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you can't get permanently deloused.
-- Henry Miller

#Blood #People #Skins

Giving and receiving are at bottom one thing, dependent on whether one lives open or closed. Living openly one becomes a medium, a transmitter; living thus, as a river, one experiences life to the full, flows along with the current of life, and dies in order to live again as an ocean.
-- Henry Miller

#Ocean #Rivers #Order

Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy.
-- Henry Miller

#Yield #Joy #Produce

She rises up out of a sea of faces and embraces me, embraces me passionately--- a thousand eyes, noses, fingers, legs, bottles, windows, purses, saucers all glaring at us an we in each other's arm oblivious. I sit down beside her and she talks--- a flood of talk. Wild consumptive notes of hysteria, perversion, leprosy. I hear not a word because she is beautiful and I love her and now I am happy and willing to die.
-- Henry Miller

#Beautiful #Eye #Sea

Everything remains unsettled forever, depend on it
-- Henry Miller

#Forever #Remains

Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end.
-- Henry Miller

#Running #Eye #Defeat

Words are loneliness.
-- Henry Miller

#Loneliness

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

#Sex #Together #World

Certainly paradise, whatever, wherever it be, contains flaws. (Paradisical flaws, if you like.) If it did not, it would be incapable of drawing the hearts of men or angels.
-- Henry Miller

#Angel #Heart #Men

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

#Happiness #Laughter #Knowing

Example moves the world more than doctrine.
-- Henry Miller

#Moving #Example #Doctrine

On the meridian of time, there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama.
-- Henry Miller

#Time #Drama #Creating

When you surrender, the problem ceases to exist. Try to solve it, or conquer it, and you only set up more resistance. . . . The most difficult thing to admit, and to realize with one's whole being, is that you alone control nothing. . . .
-- Henry Miller

#Trying #Resistance #Problem

Everything hinges on how you look at things
-- Henry Miller

#Looks

Cluster together like stars!
-- Henry Miller

#Stars #Together

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

#Happiness #Money #Determination

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

#Love #Inspirational #Life

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

#Music #Ideas #Mind

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.
-- Henry Miller

#Love #Real #Enemy

Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed.
-- Henry Miller

#Fate #Needs #Literature

History is the myth, the true myth, of man's fall made manifest in time.
-- Henry Miller

#Time #Fall #Men

To love! To surrender absolutely, to prostrate oneself before the divine image, to die a thousand imaginary deaths, to annihilate every trace of self, to find the whole universe embodied and enshrined in the living image of another! Adolescent, we say. Rot! This is the germ of the future life, the seed which we hide away, which we bury deep within us, which we smother and stifle and do our utmost to destroy as we advance from one experience to another and flutter and flounder and lose our way.
-- Henry Miller

#Self #Way #Germs

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation. Lend and borrow to the maximum.
-- Henry Miller

#Lying #Book #Shelves

Tomorrow you may bring about the destruction of your world. Tomorrow you may sing in Paradise above the smoking ruins of your world-cities. But tonight I would like to think of one man, a lone individual, a man without name or country, a man whom I respect because he has absolutely nothing in common with you - MYSELF. Tonight I shall meditate upon that which I am.
-- Henry Miller

#Country #Men #Thinking

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

#Life #Humility #Literature

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

#Passion #Mean #Fire

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

#Order #Confusion #Understanding

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

#God #Voice #Imagination

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

#Reading #Magazines #Facts

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

#Positive #Attitude #Vision

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

#Travel #Anchors #Way

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

#Crazy #World #Becoming

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

#Inspirational #Leadership #Business

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

#Leadership #Wise #Wisdom

We live at the edge of the miraculous.
-- Henry Miller

#Inspirational #Literature #Miraculous

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

#Witty #Ignorance #Knowledge

We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate.
-- Henry Miller

#Reading #Luxury #Giving

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

#Music #Beautiful #Opiates

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

#Insane #Literature #Madness

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.
-- Henry Miller

#Literature #Crime #Prisoner

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.
-- Henry Miller

#Stay Strong #Art #Philosophy

Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. To-day I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity - I belong to the earth!
-- Henry Miller

#Men #Humanity #Proud

When I realize that she is gone, perhaps gone forever, a great void opens up and I feel that I am falling, falling, falling into deep, black space. And this is worse than tears, deeper than regret or pain or sorrow, it is the abyss into which Satan was plunged. There is no climbing back, no ray of light, no sound of human voice or human touch of hand.
-- Henry Miller

#Pain #Regret #Fall

The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.
-- Henry Miller

#Art #Mind #Wake Up

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

#Inspirational #Running #Believe

...the wise man knows that every experience is to be viewed as a blessing.
-- Henry Miller

#Wise #Blessing #Men

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.
-- Henry Miller

#Tree #Joy #Fruit

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

#Liars #Lying #Writing

To be joyous is to be a madman in a world of sad ghosts.
-- Henry Miller

#World #Ghost #Madmen

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

#Change #Pain #Men

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

#Philosophy #Facts #Action

I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous man, the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the man in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable
-- Henry Miller

#Lonely #Men #Artist

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

#Life #Positive #Law Of Attraction

For the moment I can think of nothing— except that I am a sentient being stabbed by the miracle of these waters that reflect a forgotten world.
-- Henry Miller

#Thinking #Water #Miracle