Top 500 Henry Miller Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Who hates the Jews more than the Jew?”

— Henry Miller

152. “The City of New York is like an enormous citadel, a modern Carcassonne. Walking between the magnificent skyscrapers one feels the presence on the fringe of a howling, raging mob, a mob with empty bellies, a mob unshaven and in rags.”

— Henry Miller

153. “To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.”

— Henry Miller

154. “After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I’d say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you’re walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you’re not vitally interested in.”

— Henry Miller

155. “I will never again go to people under false pretenses even if it is to give them the Holy Bible. I will never again sell anything, even if I have to starve. I am going home now and I will sit down and really write about people.”

— Henry Miller

156. “When you travel often, you will be addicted to it forever.”

— Henry Miller

157. “The man who is forever disturbed about the condition of humanity either has no problems of his own or has refused to face them.”

— Henry Miller

158. “The world dies over and over again, but the skeleton always gets up and walks.”

— Henry Miller

159. “It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.”

— Henry Miller

160. “We must die as egos and be born again in the swarm, not separate and self-hypnotized, but individual and related.”

— Henry Miller

161. “But music is very important. Music is a tonic for the pineal gland. Music isn’t Bach or Beethoven; music is the can opener of the soul. It makes you terribly quiet inside, makes you aware that there’s a roof to your being.”

— Henry Miller

162. “The learning we received only tended to obscure our vision. From the day we went to school we learned nothing; on the contrary, we were made obtuse, we were wrapped in a fog of words and abstractions.”

— Henry Miller

163. “The cancer of time is eating us away.”

— Henry Miller

164. “For the moment I can think of nothing – except that I am a sentient being stabbed by the miracle of these waters that reflect a forgotten world.”

— Henry Miller

165. “I want to prevent as many men as possible from pretending that they have to do this or that because they must earn a living. It is not true. One can starve to death – it is much better. Every man who voluntarily starves to death jams another cog in the automatic process. I would rather see a man take a gun and kill his neighbor, in order to get the food he needs, than keep up the automatic process by pretending that he has to earn a living.”

— Henry Miller

166. “The vast difference between astrology and other sciences, if I may put it thus, is that astrology deals not with facts but with profundities. The solid ground on which the scientist pretends to rest gives way, in astrology, to imponderables.”

— Henry Miller

167. “All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet.”

— Henry Miller

Featured in: Reading Quotes

168. “Who wants to be a hundred? What’s the point of it? A short life and a merry one is far better than a long one sustained by fear, caution, and perpetual medical surveillance.”

— Henry Miller

169. “The legal system is often a mystery, and we, its priests, preside over rituals baffling to everyday citizens.”

— Henry Miller

170. “Plots and character don’t make life. Life is here and now, anytime you say the word, anytime you let her rip.”

— Henry Miller

171. “When I realize that she is gone, perhaps gone forever, a great void opens up and I feel that I am falling, falling, falling into deep, black space. And this is worse than tears, deeper than regret or pain or sorrow, it is the abyss into which Satan was plunged. There is no climbing back, no ray of light, no sound of human voice or human touch of hand.”

— Henry Miller

172. “The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe, he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.”

— Henry Miller

173. “Back of every creation, supporting it like an arch, is faith. Enthusiasm is nothing: it comes and goes. But if one believes, then miracles occur.”

— Henry Miller

174. “The only peace, the only security, is in fulfillment.”

— Henry Miller

175. “Art is only a means to life, the life more abundant. It merely points the way.”

— Henry Miller

176. “I used to think a bird couldn’t fly if its wings got wet.”

— Henry Miller

177. “We do not talk – we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests.”

— Henry Miller

Featured in: Reading Quotes

178. “I had to learn, as I soon did, that one must give up everything and not do anything else but write, that one must writer and write and write, even if everybody in the world advises you against it, even if nobody believes in you.”

— Henry Miller

179. “Why are we so full of restraint? Why do we not give in all directions? Is it fear of losing ourselves? Until we do lose ourselves there is no hope of finding ourselves.”

— Henry Miller

180. “There are times when I myself no longer know whether I said and did the things I report or whether I dreamed them up. Anyway, I always dream true. If I lie a bit now and then it is mainly in the interest of truth.”

— Henry Miller

181. “Voyages are accomplished inwardly.”

— Henry Miller

182. “There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness. We must get in step, a lock step, toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather will not change.”

— Henry Miller

183. “Uno pasa imperceptiblemente de una escena, una edad, una vida a otra.”

— Henry Miller

184. “We have two American flags always: one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it means danger, revolution, anarchy.”

— Henry Miller

185. “We create our fate everyday.”

— Henry Miller

186. “The world around me is dissolving leaving here and there spots of time. The world is a cancer eating itself away.”

— Henry Miller

187. “Example moves the world more than doctrine.”

— Henry Miller

189. “One of the reasons why so few of us ever act, instead of react, is because we are continually stifling our deepest impulses.”

— Henry Miller

190. “My world of human beings had perished. I was utterly alone in the world and for friends I had the streets, and the streets spoke to me in that sad, bitter language compounded of human misery, yearning, regret, failure, wasted effort.”

— Henry Miller

191. “The enchanting, and sometimes terrifying, thing is that the world can be so many things to so many different souls. That it can be, and is, all these things at once and the same time.”

— Henry Miller

192. “Als je verkiest met de kudde mee te lopen ben je immuun. Als je geaccepteerd en geapprecieerd wilt worden moet je jezelf tot een nulliteit maken, jezelf zo maken dat je niet van de kudde te onderscheiden bent. Je mag wel dromen, mits je droomt wat miljoenen anderen tegelijk dromen.”

— Henry Miller

193. “Life is constantly providing us with new funds, new resources, even when we are reduced to immobility. In life’s ledger there is no such thing as frozen assets.”

— Henry Miller

194. “Life becomes a spectacle and, if you happen to be an artist, you record the passing show.”

— Henry Miller

195. “The best technique is none at all.”

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

197. “What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.”

— Henry Miller

198. “I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.”

— Henry Miller

199. “To know Paris is to know a great deal.”

— Henry Miller

200. “Life is 440 horsepower in a 2-cylinder engine.”

— Henry Miller