Top 250 Arthur Miller Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The mission of the theatre, after all, is to change, to raise the consciousness of people to their human possibilities.”

— Arthur Miller

2. “I speak my own sins; I cannot judge another. I have no tongue for it.”

— Arthur Miller

3. “I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been.”

— Arthur Miller

4. “Life, woman, life is God’s most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it.”

— Arthur Miller

5. “Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!”

— Arthur Miller

6. “Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.”

— Arthur Miller

7. “Whoever is writing in the United States is using the American Dream as an ironical pole of his story. People elsewhere tend to accept, to a far greater degree anyway, that the conditions of life are hostile to mans pretensions.”

— Arthur Miller

8. “I think the job of the artist is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget.”

— Arthur Miller

9. “An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.”

— Arthur Miller

10. “You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away – a man is not a piece of fruit.”

— Arthur Miller

11. “The world is an oyster but you don’t crack it open on a mattress.”

— Arthur Miller

12. “The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it’s so accidental. It’s so much like life.”

— Arthur Miller

13. “More Weight -Giles Corey-.”

— Arthur Miller

14. “Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.”

— Arthur Miller

15. “One can’t stand forever on the shore. At some point, filled with indecision, skepticism, reservation and doubt, you either jump in or concede that life is forever elsewhere.”

— Arthur Miller

16. “The jungle is dark but full of diamonds, Willy.”

— Arthur Miller

17. “Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.”

— Arthur Miller

18. “Don’t be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.”

— Arthur Miller

19. “Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.”

— Arthur Miller

20. “The two most common elements in the world are hydrogen and stupidity.”

— Arthur Miller

21. “Cleave to no faith when faith brings blood.”

— Arthur Miller

22. “I may think of you softly from time to time. But I’ll cut off my hand before I ever reach for you again.”

— Arthur Miller

23. “A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.”

— Arthur Miller

24. “The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.”

— Arthur Miller

25. “HALE, with a tasty love of intellectual pursuit.”

— Arthur Miller

26. “Great drama is great questions or it is nothing but technique. I could not imagine a theater worth my time that did not want to change the world.”

— Arthur Miller

27. “He have his goodness now. God forbid I take it from him!”

— Arthur Miller

28. “Now hell and heaven grapple on our backs and all our old pretense is ripped away. Aye, and God’s icy wind will blow.”

— Arthur Miller

29. “We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!”

— Arthur Miller

30. “A child’s spirit is like a child, you can never catch it by running after it; you must stand still, and, for love, it will soon itself come back.”

— Arthur Miller

Featured in: Romance Quotes

31. “I cannot sleep for dreaming; I cannot dream but I wake and walk about the house as though I’d find you coming through some door.”

— Arthur Miller

32. “A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from. And by those he has walked away from that cause him remorse.”

— Arthur Miller

33. “Because he’s only a little boat looking for a harbor.”

— Arthur Miller

34. “If I see an ending, I can work backward.”

— Arthur Miller

35. “It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves.”

— Arthur Miller

36. “Everything we are is at every moment alive in us.”

— Arthur Miller

37. “When today fails to offer the justification for hope, tomorrow becomes the only grail worth pursuing.”

— Arthur Miller

38. “PROCTOR, his mind wild, breathless: I say – I say – God is dead!”

— Arthur Miller

39. “Playwriting is an oral art; it’s not an art of a writer expecting to be read but a writer expecting to be heard.”

— Arthur Miller

40. “Chris: I don’t know why it is, but every time I reach out for something I want, I have to pull back because other people will suffer.”

— Arthur Miller

41. “I am a good woman. I know it.”

— Arthur Miller

42. “I’ve always made a point of not wasting my life, and every time I come back here I know that all I’ve done is to waste my life.”

— Arthur Miller

43. “No one wants the truth if it is inconvenient.”

— Arthur Miller

44. “Don’t take it on yourself. Forget now. Live.”

— Arthur Miller

45. “Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You’ll never get out of the jungle that way.”

— Arthur Miller

46. “Immortality is like trying to carve your initials in a block of ice in the middle of July.”

— Arthur Miller

47. “They tried to escape technology, to stay away from that and still have relationships with their fellow humans. Very difficult.”

— Arthur Miller

48. “He’s liked, but he’s not well liked.”

— Arthur Miller

49. “Try to keep the rebel artist alive in you, no matter how attractive or exhausting the temptation.”

— Arthur Miller

50. “Well, dear, life is a casting off. It’s always that way.”

— Arthur Miller