Top 250 Arthur Miller Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

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

— Arthur Miller

155. “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

156. “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

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

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

159. “You have made your magic now.”

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

161. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

162. “A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can’t live that way you don’t stay.”

— Arthur Miller

Featured in: Country Quotes

163. “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

164. “Down deep in His heart God is a comedian who loves to make us laugh.”

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

166. “Data is a lot like humans: It is born. Matures. Gets married to other data, divorced. Gets old. One thing that it doesn’t do is die. It has to be killed.”

— Arthur Miller

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “I love her too, but our neuroses just don’t match.”

— Arthur Miller

172. “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

173. “The need of man to wholly realize himself is the only fixed star.”

— Arthur Miller

174. “The world is always ending; the exact date depends on when you came into it.”

— Arthur Miller

175. “The wedding of Christianity or Judaism with nationalism is lethal.”

— Arthur Miller

176. “What ideology, I wondered, was not based on a principled denial of the facts?”

— Arthur Miller

177. “I would be twenty before I learned how to be fifteen, thirty before I knew what it meant to be twenty, and now at seventy-two I have to stop myself from thinking like a man of fifty who has plenty of time ahead.”

— Arthur Miller

178. “I like to keep abreast of my ignorance.”

— Arthur Miller

179. “I figure I’ve done what I could do, more or less, and now I’m going back to being a chemical; all we are is a lot of talking nitrogen, you know...”

— Arthur Miller

180. “Yes, the day the world ended and nobody was innocent again. God, how swiftly it all fell down!”

— Arthur Miller

181. “The brain heals the past like an injury...”

— Arthur Miller

182. “I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn’t very difficult.”

— Arthur Miller

183. “We must re-imagine liberty in every generation, especially since a certain number of people are always afraid of it.”

— Arthur Miller

184. “A lot of my work goes to the center of where we belong – if there is any root to life -because nowadays the family is broken up, and people don’t live in the same place for very long.”

— Arthur Miller

185. “Success, instead of giving freedom ofchoice, becomes a way of life.”

— Arthur Miller

186. “It is my art. I am better at it than I ever was. And I will do it as long as I can. When you reach a certain age you can slough off what is unnecessary and concentrate on what is. And why not?”

— Arthur Miller

187. “One time there was a girl. Her name was Jane. She was a little baby. And she had a blanket. It was a small blanket. It was pink, and soft, and warm. In the morning she woke up. And the first thing she did was to touch the blanket, and it felt soft and warm when she put her fingers on it. Jane loved her pink blanket.”

— Arthur Miller

188. “I could tell you things about Louis that wouldn’t make you wave at him no more.”

— Arthur Miller

189. “He wants to live on through something – and in his case, his masterpiece is his son. All of us want that, and it gets more poignant as we get more anonymous in this world.”

— Arthur Miller

190. “It was not really possible to understand oneself, let alone another human being.”

— Arthur Miller

191. “We have not many wills, but only one – it cannot be continuously compromised without atrophy setting in altogether.”

— Arthur Miller

192. “I know that my works are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the McCarran Act.”

— Arthur Miller

193. “I don’t know a critic who penetrates the center of anything.”

— Arthur Miller

194. “The job is to ask questions – it always was – and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.”

— Arthur Miller

195. “I came into this village like a bridegroom to his beloved, bearing gifts of high religion; the very crowns of holy law I brought, and what I touched with my bright confidence, it died; and where I turned the eye of my great faith, blood flowed up. Beware, Goody Proctor – cleave to no faith when faith brings blood. It is mistaken law that leads you to sacrifice. Life, woman, life is God’s most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it.”

— Arthur Miller

196. “I’m sure there are writers who are great businessmen, but I never met any.”

— Arthur Miller

197. “Poor brain! How helplessly it dissolves when willing eyes meet and the nose warms to those old jungle scents.”

— Arthur Miller

198. “The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes.”

— Arthur Miller

199. “In a dream, we are simply confronted with various loaded symbols, and where one is exhausted, it gives way to another.”

— Arthur Miller

200. “This is not god Marco you hear me, only god makes justice.”

— Arthur Miller