Top 500 Henry Miller Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “You are always laughing at the wrong moment; you are considered cruel and heartless when in reality you are only tough and durable. But if you would laugh when others laugh and weep when they weep then you must be prepared to die as they die and live as they live.”

— Henry Miller

202. “We don’t trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation.”

— Henry Miller

203. “Everyman, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths.”

— Henry Miller

204. “Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.”

— Henry Miller

205. “I believe in saying the truth, coming out with it cold, shocking if necessary, not disguising it.”

— Henry Miller

206. “Your nearness is the nearness of planets. I am the void between you. If I withdraw there will be no void for you to swim in.”

— Henry Miller

207. “We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets – we remember only.”

— Henry Miller

208. “You can travel fifty thousand miles in America without once tasting a piece of good bread.”

— Henry Miller

209. “Understanding is not a piercing of the mystery, but an acceptance of it, a living blissfully with it, in it, through and by it.”

— Henry Miller

210. “We create our fate every day that we live.”

— Henry Miller

211. “For her were meant those terrible words of Louis-Philippe, “and a night comes when all is over, when so many jaws have closed upon us that we no longer have the strength to stand, and our meat hangs upon our bodies, as though it had been masticated by every mouth.”

— Henry Miller

212. “Thyroid eyes. Michelin lips. Voice like pea soup.”

— Henry Miller

213. “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

214. “Were there a Christian so faithful to his God as I was to her we would all be Jesus Christ today.”

— Henry Miller

215. “The real enemy can always be met and conquered, or won over. Real antagonism is based on love, a love which has not recognized itself.”

— Henry Miller

216. “I am of the order whose purpose is not to teach the world a lesson but to explain that school is over.”

— Henry Miller

217. “Part of the act of creating is in discovering your own kind. They are everywhere. But don’t look for them in the wrong places.”

— Henry Miller

218. “Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed.”

— Henry Miller

219. “It’s good to be just plain happy, it’s a little better to know that you’re happy; but to understand that you’re happy and to know why and how and still be happy, be happy in the being and the knowing, well that is beyond happiness, that is bliss.”

— Henry Miller

220. “I am so thoroughly healthy and empty. No dreams, no desires. I am like the luscious deceptive fruit which hangs on the Californian trees. One more ray of sun and I will be rotten.”

— Henry Miller

221. “Human beings make a strange fauna and flora. From a distance they appear negligible; close up they are apt to appear ugly and malicious. More than anything they need to be surrounded with sufficient space – space even more than time.”

— Henry Miller

222. “New York has a trip-hammer vitality which drives you insane with restlessness if you have no inner stabilizer.”

— Henry Miller

223. “Twilight hour. Indian blue, water of glass, trees glistening and liquescent.”

— Henry Miller

224. “The world is two thirds spaghetti and meatballs, one third syphilitic chancre.”

— Henry Miller

225. “One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.”

— Henry Miller

226. “Nothing is right or wrong but thinking makes it so. You no longer believe in reality but in thinking. And when you are pushed off the dead end your thoughts go with you and they are of no use to you.”

— Henry Miller

227. “If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms.”

— Henry Miller

228. “There are so many ways of walking about and the best, in my opinion, is the Greek way, because it is aimless, anarchic, thoroughly and discordantly human.”

— Henry Miller

229. “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

230. “The poem is the dream made flesh, in a two-fold sense: as work of art, and as life, which is a work of art.”

— Henry Miller

231. “Paint what you like and die happy.”

— Henry Miller

232. “Surrealism is merely the reflection of the death process. It is one of the manifestations of a life becoming extinct, a virus which quickens the inevitable end.”

— Henry Miller

233. “The tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on my face. Thousands and thousands of us, and we’re passing one another without a look of recognition.”

— Henry Miller

234. “The world itself is pregnant with failure, is the perfect manifestation of imperfection, of the consciousness of failure.”

— Henry Miller

235. “Night is longing, longing, longing, beyond all endurance.”

— Henry Miller

236. “The smile was so painfully swift and fleeting that it was like the flash of a knife.”

— Henry Miller

237. “In every man’s heart there is anchored a little schooner.”

— Henry Miller

238. “In the attempt to defeat death man has been inevitably obliged to defeat life, for the two are inextricably related. Life moves on to death, and to deny one is to deny the other.”

— Henry Miller

239. “The man who is intoxicated with life does not pass judgment, does not seek to come to a conclusion, does not impose his message on the world.”

— Henry Miller

240. “We must get going. Tomorrow, tomorrow...”

— Henry Miller

241. “I had no more need of God than He had of me, and if there were one, I often said to myself, I would meet Him calmly and spit in His face.”

— Henry Miller

242. “This is not a book in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will.”

— Henry Miller

243. “It was only in my forties that I started feeling young.”

— Henry Miller

244. “There are people who cannot resist the desire to get into a cage with wild beasts and be mangled.”

— Henry Miller

245. “Nothing that had happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed except my illusions. I myself was intact. The world was intact.”

— Henry Miller

246. “Life’s wildest moment – she kneels on the sidewalk. Everything else she does is lies, lies.”

— Henry Miller

247. “The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble.”

— Henry Miller

248. “The monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses.”

— Henry Miller

249. “No matter how vast, how total, the failure of man here on earth, the work of man will be resumed elsewhere. War leaders talk of resuming operations on this front and that, but man’s front embraces the whole universe.”

— Henry Miller

250. “Through endless night the earth whirls toward a creation unknown...”

— Henry Miller