Top 450 Henry Miller Quotes (2023 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

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

— Henry Miller

254. “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

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

— Henry Miller

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

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

— Henry Miller

262. “Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.”

— Henry Miller

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

280. “Everything hinges on how you look at things.”

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

282. “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

283. “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

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

— Henry Miller

285. “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

286. “Voyages are accomplished inwardly.”

— Henry Miller

287. “Between laughs I could hear my mother’s words ringing in my ears. “Why don’t you write something that will sell?”

— Henry Miller

288. “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

289. “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

290. “The only difference between the Adamic man and the man of today is that the one was born to Paradise and the other has to create it.”

— Henry Miller

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

294. “I would like to suffocate with grief but instead I give birth to a rock.”

— Henry Miller

295. “I shall be the wild park in the midst of the nightmare of perfection, the still, unshakeable dream in the midst of frenzied activity, the random shot on the white billiard table of logic, I shall know neither how to weep nor protest, but I shall be there always in absolute silence to receive and to restore.”

— Henry Miller

296. “I reached out for something to attach myself to – and I found nothing. But in reaching out, in the effort to grasp, to attach myself, left high and dry as I was, I nevertheless found something I had not looked for – myself.”

— Henry Miller

297. “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

298. “Man, as man, has never realized himself. The greater part of him, his potential being, has always been submerged. What is history if not the endless story of his repeated failures?”

— Henry Miller

299. “On one side of the ledger are the books man has written, containing sucha a hodgepodge of wisdom and nonsense, truth and falsehood, that if one lived to be as old as Methuselah one couldn’t disentangle the mess; on the other side of the ledger things like toenails, hair, teeth, blood, ovaries, if you will, all incalculable and all written in another kind of ink, in another script, an incomprehensible, undecipherable script.”

— Henry Miller

300. “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