Top 250 Arthur Miller Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “To suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation, when all you really desire is to be outdoors, with your shirt off.”

— Arthur Miller

152. “Let you look sometimes for the goodness in me, and judge me not.”

— Arthur Miller

153. “But then, it’s what I always wanted. My own apartment, a car, and plenty of women. And still, goddammit, I’m lonely.”

— Arthur Miller

154. “Now, as the weeks passed, there was a future, there was a trouble that would not go away.”

— Arthur Miller

155. “The house is two stories high and has seven rooms. It would have cost perhaps fifteen thousand in the early twenties when it was built.”

— Arthur Miller

156. “But you didn’t rest your mind. your mind is overactive, and the mind is what counts, dear.”

— Arthur Miller

157. “MOTHER: What more can we be! CHRIS: You can be better! Once and for all you can know there’s a universe of people outside and you’re responsible to it, and unless you know that you threw away your son because that’s why he died.”

— Arthur Miller

158. “John Proctor: I will fall like an ocean on that court!”

— Arthur Miller

159. “The tragic right is a condition of life, a condition in which the human personality is able to flower and realize itself. The wrong is the condition which suppresses man, perverts the flowing out of his love and creative instinct. Tragedy enlightens-and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man’s freedom. The thrust for freedom is the quality in tragedy which exalts. The revolutionary questioning of the stable environment is what terrifies.”

— Arthur Miller

160. “He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.”

— Arthur Miller

161. “Oh, there were many here who were justly shot by unjust men.”

— Arthur Miller

162. “I don’t say he’s a great man. Willie Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.”

— Arthur Miller

163. “The word “now” is like a bomb through the window, and it ticks.”

— Arthur Miller

164. “Every time I am reading actors I can pretty well tell which ones have studied with Meisner. It is because they are honest and simple and don’t lay on complications that aren’t necessary.”

— Arthur Miller

165. “A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.”

— Arthur Miller

166. “Memory inevitably romanticizes, pressing reality to recede like pain.”

— Arthur Miller

167. “You want to live? You better figure out your life.”

— Arthur Miller

168. “The Devil is precise; the marks of his presence are definite as stone...”

— Arthur Miller

169. “Everything influences playwrights. A playwright who isn’t influenced is never of any use.”

— Arthur Miller

170. “I believe in work. If somebody doesn’t create something, however small it may be, he gets sick. An awful lot of people feel that they’re treading water – that if they vanished in smoke, it wouldn’t mean anything at all in this world. And that’s a despairing and destructive feeling. It’ll kill you.”

— Arthur Miller

171. “PROCTOR – he knows it is insane: No, it is not the same! What others say and what i sign to is not the same!”

— Arthur Miller

172. “If you analyse anything, you destroy it.”

— Arthur Miller

173. “But we are mostly what we are, and the turtle stretching toward delicious buds on high does not lighten his carapace by his resolve.”

— Arthur Miller

174. “You make mountains out of molehills.”

— Arthur Miller

175. “One had the right to write because other people needed news of the inner world, and if they went too long without such news they would go mad with the chaos of their lives.”

— Arthur Miller

176. “It is time that we, who are without kings, took up this bright thread of our history and followed it to the only place it can possibly lead in our time-the heart and spirit of the average man.”

— Arthur Miller

177. “There is unquestionably a contradiction between an efficient technological machine and the flowering of human nature, of the human personality.”

— Arthur Miller

178. “A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from.”

— Arthur Miller

179. “There are many who stay away from church these days because you hardly ever mention God any more.”

— Arthur Miller

180. “The human reality of what happens to millions is only for God to grasp; but what happens to individuals is another matter and within the range of mortal understanding.”

— Arthur Miller

181. “When the guns roar, the arts die.”

— Arthur Miller

182. “I’m one-dollar an hour, Willy! I tried seven states and couldn’t raise it. A buck an hour! Do you gather my meaning? I’m not bringing home any prizes anymore and you’re going to stop waiting for me to bring them home!”

— Arthur Miller

183. “The famous are balloons far up in the sky, to be envied for their quiet freedom or shot down as enemies.”

— Arthur Miller

184. “In an ordinary crime, how does one defend the accused? One calls up witnesses to prove his innocence. But witchcraft is ipso facto, on its face and by its nature an invisible crime, is it not? The witch and the victim. None other. Now we cannot hope the witch will accuse herself; granted? Therefore, we must rely upon her victims – and they do testify, the children certainly do testify.”

— Arthur Miller

185. “You have made your magic now.”

— Arthur Miller

186. “The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.”

— Arthur Miller

187. “Rise early. Write. Disappoint your sons. Read the newspaper. Go to bed early. Success.”

— Arthur Miller

188. “What is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? These people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all.”

— Arthur Miller

189. “That is a very good question. I don’t know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?”

— Arthur Miller

190. “The arts can do more to sustain the peace than all the wars, the armaments, and the threats and warnings of politicians.”

— Arthur Miller

191. “You want somethin’ else, Eddie, and you can never have her!”

— Arthur Miller

192. “On the road I want to grab you sometimes and just kiss the life outa you.”

— Arthur Miller

193. “Elizabeth, with sarcasm and a sense of being lost: Oh indeed! Indeed!”

— Arthur Miller

194. “If I have any justification for having lived it’s simply, I’m nothing but faults, failures and so on, but I have tried to make a good pair of shoes. There’s some value in that.”

— Arthur Miller

195. “The car, the furniture, the wife, the children – everything has to be disposable. Because you see the main thing today is – shopping.”

— Arthur Miller

196. “There is a kind of perverse unity forming among us, born, I think, of the discontent of all classes of people with the endless frustration of life.”

— Arthur Miller

197. “Flight Reservation Systems decide whether or not you exist. If your information isn’t in their database, then you simply don’t get to go anywhere.”

— Arthur Miller

198. “Part of knowing who we are is knowing we are not someone else. And Jew is only the name we give to that stranger, the agony we cannot feel, the death we look at like a cold abstraction. Each man has his Jew; it is the other.”

— Arthur Miller

199. “People do look to others for some leadership, and it’s not bad for them to supply it when they feel that way.”

— Arthur Miller

200. “We used to shoot a man who acted like a dog, but honor was real there, you were protecting something. But here? This is the land of the great big dogs, you don’t love a man here, you eat him! That’s the principle ; the only one we live by.”

— Arthur Miller