Top 250 Arthur Miller Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “She could reach up to the table and take a cookie or a spoon. She could stand at the window and look outside. She could do a lot of things now which she could not do when she was a little baby.”

— Arthur Miller

202. “FRANK, peeved: The trouble with you is, you don’t believe in anything. JIM: And your trouble is that you believe in anything. You didn’t see my kid this morning, did you?”

— Arthur Miller

203. “Nevertheless, one learned very early that books had to be respected; they were all putative Bibles and to some small degree had a share in holiness.”

— Arthur Miller

204. “Like every writer, I am asked where my work originates, and if I knew I would go there more often to find more.”

— Arthur Miller

205. “It may be that even if half consciously, we choose our personalities to maintain a certain saving balance in the family’s little universe.”

— Arthur Miller

206. “In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks. On screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera.”

— Arthur Miller

207. “Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.”

— Arthur Miller

208. “You never do any good until you get into some trouble.”

— Arthur Miller

209. “To admit what you see endangers principles.”

— Arthur Miller

210. “Your blanket is all torn because it’s old.” “It is not old,” Jane said. “But it is old,” Jane’s mother said. “We bought it when you were born. And then we had to wash it lots of times. And we washed it and washed it, and now it is all worn out. Look, you have a nice new big blanket. You don’t need that old blanket. That old blanket is like a rag now, darling.”

— Arthur Miller

211. “Every man does have a star. the star of one’s honesty. and you spend your life groping for it, but once its out it never lights again.”

— Arthur Miller

212. “The growing sensitivity of people to any sort of open and frank discussion of important issues is no service to civilisation, let alone law and order. I wrote a play about a man who happened to be a salesman, and several organisations of sales people flew to arms. Now it is the lawyers. If I am to back away from these objections you must surely see that I shall be forced to write about people with no occupation whatever.”

— Arthur Miller

213. “MOTHER: You think just because you like everybody, they like you!”

— Arthur Miller

214. “They believed, in short, that they held in their steady hands the candle that would light the world. We have inherited this belief, and it has helped and hurt us.”

— Arthur Miller

215. “Is that as far as your mind can see, the business? What is that, the world – the business? What the hell do you mean, you did it for me? Don’t you have a country? Don’t you live in the world? What the hell are you? You’re not even an animal, no animal kills his own, what are you? What must I do to you? I ought to tear the tongue out of your mouth, what must I do?”

— Arthur Miller

216. “It was in my twenties that I felt old, that was when time was an abrasive wheel grinding me down. But it was not so much death I feared as insignificance.”

— Arthur Miller

217. “Then what is this if it isn’t telling me? Sure, he was my son. But I think to him they were all my sons. And I guess they were, I guess they were.”

— Arthur Miller

218. “No man only needs a little salary.”

— Arthur Miller

219. “MONCEAU: In my opinion you’re hysterical. After all, they were picking up Jews in Germany for years before the war, they’ve been doing it in Paris since they came in – are you telling me all those people are dead? Is that really conceivable to you? War is war, but you still have to keep a certain sense of proportion. I mean Germans are still people.”

— Arthur Miller

220. “If I strike oil I’ll send you a check. Meantime forget I’m alive.”

— Arthur Miller

221. “Every generation looks back longingly to an earlier age when things were simpler and clearer, a time before degeneration began.”

— Arthur Miller

222. “Certain things have to be, the sun has to rise.”

— Arthur Miller

223. “He was talking as though someone we both knew had just died, and it filled me with happiness. Such is art.”

— Arthur Miller

224. “God’s power is love without limit. But when a man dares reach for that... he is only reaching for the power.”

— Arthur Miller

225. “When it is recalled that until the Christian era the underworld was never regardded as a hostile area, that all gods were useful and essentially friendly to man despite occasional lapsesl when we see the steady methodical inculcation into humanity of the idea of man’s worthlesseness – until redeemed – the necessity of the Devil may become evident as a weapon, a weapon designed and used time and time again in every age to whip men into a surrender to a particular church or church state.”

— Arthur Miller

226. “My dreams of many years had simply become too damned real, and the reality was less than the dream and lacked all dedication.”

— Arthur Miller

227. “The magistrate sits in your heart that judges you.”

— Arthur Miller

228. “CAPTAIN: Try to avoid taking anybody out of a crowd. Just cruise around the way we did before, and take them one at a time. There are all kinds of rumors. We don’t want to alarm people.”

— Arthur Miller

229. “Perhaps because there are those who believe that authority is all of a piece and that to challenge it anywhere is to threaten it everywhere.”

— Arthur Miller

230. “The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you’re a salesman, and you don’t know that.”

— Arthur Miller

231. “Willy Loman: I don’t want change, I want Swiss cheese!”

— Arthur Miller

232. “What work you do! It’s strange work for a Christian girl to hang old women!”

— Arthur Miller

233. “Work a lifetime to pay off a house You finally own it and there’s nobody to live in it.”

— Arthur Miller

234. “Pop, I’m nothing! I’m nothing, Pop. Can’t you understand that? There’s no spite in it any more. I’m just what I am, that’s all.”

— Arthur Miller

235. “When one rises above the individual villainy displayed, one can only pity them all, just as we shall be pitied some day.”

— Arthur Miller

236. “The concept of unity, in which positive and negative are attributes of the same force, in which good and evil are relative, ever-changing, and always joined to the same phenomenon – such a concept is still reserved to the physical sciences and to the few who have grasped the history of ideas.”

— Arthur Miller

237. “THE PRICE grew out of a need to reconfirm the power of the past, the seedbed of current reality, and the way to possibly reaffirm cause and effect in an insane world.”

— Arthur Miller

238. “Well, I spent six or seven years after high school trying to work myself up. Shipping clerk, salesman, business of one kind or another. And it’s a measly manner of existence. To get on that subway on the hot mornings in summer. To devote your whole life to keeping stock, or making phone calls, or selling or buying. 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. And always to have to get ahead of the next fella. And still – that’s how you build a future.”

— Arthur Miller

239. “Peace. It is a providence, and no great change; we are only what we always were, but naked now.”

— Arthur Miller

240. “BIFF: I am not a leader of men, Willy, and neither are you. You were never anything but a hard-working drummer who landed in the ash can like all the rest of them! 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 any more, and you’re going to stop waiting for me to bring them home!”

— Arthur Miller

241. “The only thing you’ve got in this world is what you can sell.”

— Arthur Miller

242. “When a deposit bottle is broken, you don’t get your nickel back.”

— Arthur Miller

243. “Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back – that’s an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.”

— Arthur Miller

244. “I stopped in the middle of that building and I saw – the sky. I saw the things that I love in this world. The work and the food and time time to sit and smoke. And I looked at the pen and said to myself, what the hell am I grabbing this for? Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am! Why can’t I say that, Willy?”

— Arthur Miller

245. “Who worked for nothin’ in that war? When they work for nothin’, I’ll work for nothin’. Did they ship a gun or a truck outa Detroit before they got their price? Is that clean? It’s dollars and cents, nickels and dimes; war and peace, it’s nickels and dimes, what’s clean? Half the Goddam country is gotta go if I go! That’s why you can’t tell me.”

— Arthur Miller

246. “He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back – that’s an earthquake. And then you get a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished.”

— Arthur Miller

247. “I made a gift for you, Good Proctor. I had to sit long hours in a chair, and passed the time with sewing.” – Mary Warren.”

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

249. “You make mountains out of molehills.”

— Arthur Miller

250. “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