Top 500 Henry Miller Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “You start with the sublime and end up in an alley jerking away for dear life.”

— Henry Miller

252. “I felt free and chained at the same time – like one feels just before election, when all the crooks have been nominated and you are beseeched to vote for the right man.”

— Henry Miller

253. “Up on the Brooklyn Bridge a man is standing in agony, waiting to jump, or waiting to write a poem, or waiting for the blood to leave his vessels because if he advances another foot the pain of his love will kill him.”

— Henry Miller

254. “The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive.”

— Henry Miller

255. “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

256. “The cradles of civilization are the putrid sinks of the world.”

— Henry Miller

257. “So, whether the world is going to pieces or not, whether you are on the side of the angels or the devil himself, take life for what it is, have fun, spread joy and confusion.”

— Henry Miller

258. “I don’t know whether you’ve ever had a woman eat an apple while you were doing it. Well, you can imagine how that affects you.”

— Henry Miller

259. “I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.”

— Henry Miller

260. “The most difficult thing to adjust to, apparently, is peace and contentment.”

— Henry Miller

261. “Every day that we fail to live out the maximum of our potentialities we kill the Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, Christ which is in us.”

— Henry Miller

262. “America is no place for an artist: to be an artist is to be a moral leper, an economic misfit, a social liability. A corn-fed hog enjoys a better life than a creative writer, painter or musician. To be a rabbit is better still.”

— Henry Miller

263. “Somewhere along the way one discovers that what one has to tell is not nearly so important as the telling itself.”

— Henry Miller

264. “I wanted to die; I wanted to surrender because I saw no sense in struggling. I felt that nothing would be proved, substantiated, added or subtracted by continuing an existence which I had not asked for.”

— Henry Miller

265. “Obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk.”

— Henry Miller

266. “I don’t know which affected me more deeply – the story of the lemon groves just opposite us or the sight of Poros itself when suddenly I realized that we were sailing through the streets. If there is one dream which I like above all others it is that of sailing on land.”

— Henry Miller

267. “Everybody is giving birth to something – everybody but the lesbian in the upper tier. Her head is uptilted, her throat wide open; she is all alert and tingling with the shower of sparks that burst from the radium symphony. Jupiter is piercing her ears.”

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

269. “Man torturing man is a fiend beyond description. You turn a corner in the dark and there he is. You congeal into a bundle of inanimate fear. You become the very soul of anesthesia. But there is no escaping him. It is your turn now...”

— Henry Miller

270. “Do not be duped by little duties. Do not be a chore man all your days.”

— Henry Miller

271. “Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect upon me. For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some extrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything, I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders.”

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

273. “But it’s just because the chances are all against you, just because there is so little hope, that life is sweet over here.”

— Henry Miller

274. “Moralities, ethics, laws, customs, beliefs, doctrines – these are of trifling import. All that matters is that the miraculous become the norm.”

— Henry Miller

275. “Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil.”

— Henry Miller

276. “In Europe one gets used to doing nothing. You sit on your ass and whine all day. You get contaminated. You rot.”

— Henry Miller

277. “I suffer because of myself. It is my own soul all the time that is bothering me.”

— Henry Miller

278. “I saw through to the last sign and symbol, but I could not read her face. I could see only the eyes shining through, huge, fleshy-like luminous beasts, as though I were swimming behind them in the electric effluvia of her incandescent vision.”

— Henry Miller

279. “Man is not at home in the universe, despite all the efforts of philosophers and metaphysicians to provide a soothing syrup. Thought is still a narcotic. The deepest question is why. And it is a forbidden one. The very asking is in the nature of cosmic sabotage. And the penalty is – the afflictions of Job.”

— Henry Miller

280. “Everything is endured – disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui – in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable.”

— Henry Miller

281. “How different the new order would be if we could consult the veteran instead of the politician.”

— Henry Miller

282. “Taboos, though unadmitted, are potent. What is it that people fear? What they don’t understand. The civilized man is not a whit different from the savage in this respect. The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is, different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive.”

— Henry Miller

283. “If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself.”

— Henry Miller

284. “My policy has always been to burn my bridges behind me. My face is always set toward the future. If I make a mistake it is fatal. When I am flung back I fall all the way back – to the very bottom. My one safeguard is my resiliency. So far I have always bounced back.”

— Henry Miller

285. “No one asks you to throw Mozart out of the window. Keep Mozart. Cherish him. Keep Moses too, and Buddha and Lao Tzu and Christ. Keep them in your heart. But make room for the others, the coming ones, the ones who are already scratching on the window-panes.”

— Henry Miller

286. “We came together in a dance of death and so quickly was I sucked down into the vortex that when I came to the surface again I couldn’t recognize the world. When I found myself loose the music had ceased; the carnival was over and I had been picked clean.”

— Henry Miller

287. “Art consists in going the full length. If you start with the drums you have to end with dynamite, or TNT.”

— Henry Miller

288. “And the books you write. They’re not you. They’re not me sitting here, this Henry Miller. They belong to someone else. It’s terrible. You can never rest.”

— Henry Miller

289. “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

290. “From the time you wake up until the moment you go to bed it’s all a lie, all a sham and a swindle. Everybody knows it, and everybody collaborates in the perpetuation of the hoax. That’s why we look so goddamned disgusting to one another.”

— Henry Miller

291. “The Englishman, be it noted, seldom resorts to violence; when he is sufficiently goaded he simply opens up, like the oyster, and devours his adversary.”

— Henry Miller

292. “If you elect to join the herd you are immune. To be accepted and appreciated you must nullify yourself, make yourself indistinguishable from the herd. You may dream, if you dream alike.”

— Henry Miller

293. “The Teutons have been singing the swan song ever since they entered the ranks of history. They have always confounded truth with death.”

— Henry Miller

294. “There is nothing strange about fear: no matter in what guise it presents itself it is something with which we are all so familiar that when a man appears who is without it we are at once enslaved by him.”

— Henry Miller

295. “The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself.”

— Henry Miller

296. “It is no accident that propels people like us to Paris.”

— Henry Miller

297. “Voyages are accomplished inwardly.”

— Henry Miller

298. “It’s the pleasure of picking up the brush and seeing what happens.”

— Henry Miller

299. “I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with it’s painful gall-stones, it’s gravel and what-not; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul...”

— Henry Miller

300. “It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir.”

— Henry Miller