Top 500 Henry Miller Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “You can’t make people joyous just by being joyous yourself. Joy has to be generated by oneself: it is or it isn’t. Joy is founded on something too profound to be understood and communicated. To be joyous is to be a madman in a world of sad ghosts.”

— Henry Miller

452. “What most people fear when they think of old age is the inability to make new friends. If one ever had the faculty of making friends one never loses it however old one grows. Next to love friendship, in my opinion, is the most valuable thing life has to offer.”

— Henry Miller

453. “The whole world seemed to unroll like a pornographic film whose tragic theme is impotence.”

— Henry Miller

454. “He wakes up cursing himself, or cursing the job, or cursing life.”

— Henry Miller

455. “He wakes up utterly bored and discomfited, chagrined to think that he did not die overnight.”

— Henry Miller

456. “There is no fundamental, unalterable difference between things: all is flux, all is perishable. The surface of your being is constantly crumbling; within however you grow hard as a diamond. And perhaps it is this hard, magnetic core inside you which attracts others to you willy-nilly.”

— Henry Miller

457. “When you know what men are capable of you marvel neither at their sublimity nor their baseness. There are no limits in either direction apparently.”

— Henry Miller

458. “To walk in money through the night crowd, protected by money, lulled by money, dulled by money, the crowd itself a money, the breath money, no least single object anywhere that is not money, money, money everywhere and still not enough, and then no money, or a little money or less money or more money, but money, always money, and if you have money or don’t have money it is the money that counts and money makes money, but what makes money make money?”

— Henry Miller

459. “In the ultimate sense, the world itself is pregnant with failure, is the perfect manifestation of imperfection, of the consciousness of failure. In the realization of this, failure is itself eliminated.”

— Henry Miller

460. “Analysis brings no curative powers in its train; it merely makes us conscious of the existence of an evil, which, oddly enough, is consciousness.”

— Henry Miller

461. “Europe – medieval, grotesque, monstrous: a symphony in B-mol.”

— Henry Miller

462. “I had changed my francs into drachmas on the boat; it seemed like a tremendous wad that I had stuffed into my pocket and I felt that I could meet the bill no matter how exorbitant it might be. I knew we were going to be gypped and I looked forward to it with relish. The only thing that was solidly fixed in my mind about the Greeks was that you couldn’t trust them; I would have been disappointed if our guide had turned out to be magnanimous and chivalrous.”

— Henry Miller

463. “No man ever puts down what he intended to say... words... are but crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain and sorrow to commemorate an event which is untransmissible.”

— Henry Miller

464. “There is something else to be said about this immediate, spontaneous way of working, and that is this: in such moments, one is playing at the game of creation.”

— Henry Miller

465. “I would say that the “masterpiece” was the creative act itself and not a particular work which happened to please a large audience and be accepted as the very body of Christ.”

— Henry Miller

466. “How very like Zen is this from Whitman: “Is it lucky to be born? It is just as lucky to die.” In summarizing his pages on Whitman, Bucke makes, among others, the following statements: In no man who ever lived was the sense of eternal life so absolute. Fear of death was absent. Neither in health nor in sickness did he show any sign of it, and there is every reason to believe he did not feel it. He had no sense of sin.”

— Henry Miller

467. “The one thing I have insisted on with all of my friends, regardless of class or station in life, is to be able to speak truthfully. If I cannot be open and frank with a friend, or he with me, I drop him.”

— Henry Miller

468. “Always a good dodge to simplify your problem by removing it.”

— Henry Miller

469. “What is this chaff we chew in our sleep if it is not the remembrance of fang-whorl and star cluster.”

— Henry Miller

470. “Nothing will avail to offset this virus which is poisoning the whole world. America is the very incarnation of doom. She will drag the whole world down to the bottomless pit.”

— Henry Miller

471. “When a portrait commences badly it’s because you’re not describing the woman you have in mind: you are thinking more about those who are going to look at the portrait than about the woman who is sitting for you.”

— Henry Miller

472. “In my mind I saw my own temples in ruins, before even one brick had been laid upon another.”

— Henry Miller

473. “I know what the great cure is: to give up, to relinquish, to surrender, so that our little hearts may beat in unison with the great heart of the world.”

— Henry Miller

474. “Dostoyevsky was the sum of all these contradictions which either paralyze a man or lead him to the heights.”

— Henry Miller

475. “Someday I am going to own a few feet of earth somewhere and put a house over it. Just one big room will do, with a stove and a basin of water, a huge desk, a bookcase and an easel. Then life can go rolling by, and what floats in through my door will be sufficient for me.”

— Henry Miller

476. “Life will continue to be a hell as long as the people who make up the world shut their eyes to reality. Switching from one ideology to another is a useless game.”

— Henry Miller

477. “Artists never thrive in colonies.”

— Henry Miller

478. “A fatuous, suicidal wish that is constipated by words and paralyzed by thought.”

— Henry Miller

479. “Despite all the talk about freedom of speech, freedom of the press, electoral freedom, and so on, I dare say it would be a shock to know what the common man thinks about the problems which confront the world. The common man is always cleverly set off one against the other, children are always ruled out, young people are ordered to conform and obey, and the views of the wise, the saintly, the true servers of mankind, are forever scorned as impractical.”

— Henry Miller

480. “Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance, but a dance!”

— Henry Miller

481. “What we don’t want to face, what we don’t want to hear or listen to, whether it be nonsense, treason or sacrilege, are precisely the things we must give heed to. Even the idiot may have a message for us. Maybe I am one of those idiots. But I will have my say.”

— Henry Miller

482. “Are we not all victims of fear and anxiety precisely because we lack faith and trust in one another?”

— Henry Miller

483. “Jesus made a number of explicit statements, injunctions really. All to the effect that one was to take no thought but to respond immediately to any appeal for aid. And to respond in large measure. To give your cloak as well as your coat, to walk two miles and not one. And as we know well, with these injunctions went another, more important one – to return good for evil. “Resist not evil!”

— Henry Miller

484. “The thinking that gets you nowhere takes you everywhere.”

— Henry Miller

485. “Kafka’s long nightmares were but a preparation for the actual horrors we were to experience even to a greater degree.”

— Henry Miller

486. “Animate or inanimate, all bodies under the sun give expression to their vitality. Especially on a fine day in spring!”

— Henry Miller

487. “The book is sustained on its own axis by the pure flux and rotation of events. Just as there is no central point, so also there is no question of heroism or of struggle since there is no question of will, but only an obedience to flow.”

— Henry Miller

488. “What we learn, of value, we get indirectly, largely unconsciously. It is too often stressed, in my opinion, that we learn through sorrow and suffering. I do not deny this to be true, but I hold that we also learn, and perhaps more lastingly, through moments of joy, of bliss, of ecstasy. Struggle has its importance, but we tend to overrate it. Harmony, serenity, bliss do not come from struggle but from surrender.”

— Henry Miller

489. “Better keep the young on lemons and lavender until they’ve reached the age of discretion.”

— Henry Miller

490. “Nothing is more obscene than inertia. More blasphemous than the bloodiest oath is paralysis.”

— Henry Miller

491. “You see, people read to be amused, to pass the time, I never read to be instructed; I read to be taken out of myself, to become ecstatic. I’m always looking for the author who can take me out of myself.”

— Henry Miller

492. “It’s hard to talk to a person when you have nothing in common with him or her, you betray yourself.”

— Henry Miller

493. “The world is always dying and always coming back to life. Tide and pulse, and with the turn of the tide a touch of mystery.”

— Henry Miller

494. “In a world grown paralyzed with introspection and constipated by delicate mental meals this brutal exposure of the substantial body comes as a vitalizing current of blood. The violence and obscenity are left unadulterated, as manifestation of the mystery and pain which ever accompanies the act of creation.”

— Henry Miller

495. “I think of so many eminent men who visited these shores only to return to their native land saddened, disgusted and disillusioned. There is one thing America has to give, and that they are all in agreement about: MONEY.”

— Henry Miller

496. “The young Hindu, of course, is optimistic. He has been to America and he has been contaminated by the cheap idealism of the Americans, contaminated by the ubiquitous bathtub, the five-and-ten-cent store bric-a-brac, the bustle, the efficiency, the machinery, the high wages, the free libraries, etc., etc.”

— Henry Miller

497. “I was cursed or blessed with a prolonged adolescence; I arrived at some seeming maturity when I was past thirty. It was only in my forties that I really began to feel young. By then I was ready for it.”

— Henry Miller

498. “I had moment of ecstasy and I sang with burning sparks. I sang of the Equator, her red-feathered legs and the islands dropping out of sight. But nobody heard.”

— Henry Miller

499. “A weird sort of contentment in those days. No appointments, no invitations for dinner, no program, no dough. The golden period, when I had not a single friend.”

— Henry Miller

500. “A writer often has two great surprises in store for him: the first is the lack of proper response to his efforts; the second is the overwhelming nature of the response when it does come. One is just as bad as the other.”

— Henry Miller