Top 250 Arthur Miller Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “The world is always ending; the exact date depends on when you came into it.”

— Arthur Miller

202. “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

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

— Arthur Miller

204. “Gotta break your neck to see a star in this yard.”

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

210. “Amos Oz is one of the finest novelists of this entire period. MY MICHAEL is a beautiful work of great depth and in some indescribable way lingers in the mind as a lyric song to his country’s people as much as a moving love story.”

— Arthur Miller

211. “I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theatre, or the play – but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem.”

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

213. “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

214. “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

215. “How can they whip cheese?”

— Arthur Miller

216. “You cant get very far in this world without your dossier being there first.”

— Arthur Miller

217. “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

218. “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

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

— Arthur Miller

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

224. “I’m the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.”

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

226. “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

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

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

229. “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

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

— Arthur Miller

231. “A fart on Thomas Putnam.”

— Arthur Miller

232. “MARCHAND, leaning forward to see Monceau: You would think, though, that with the manpower shortage they’d economize on personnel. In the car that stopped me there was a driver, two French detectives, and a German official of some kind. They could easily have put a notice in the paper – everyone would have come here to present his documents. This way it’s a whole morning wasted. Aside from the embarrassment. LEBEAU: I’m not embarrassed, I’m scared to death. To Bayard: You embarrassed?”

— Arthur Miller

233. “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

234. “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

235. “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

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

— Arthur Miller

237. “It occurs to me that with all the television people watch, most of their acquaintances are actors.”

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

239. “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

240. “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

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

— Arthur Miller

242. “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

243. “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

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

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

246. “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

247. “How to live had started out as an analytical problem of how to place himself so as to intercept the flow of money in the society.”

— Arthur Miller

248. “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

249. “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

250. “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