Top 500 Henry Miller Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “One is ejected into the world like a dirty little mummy; the roads are slippery with blood and no one knows why it should be so. Each one is traveling his own way and, though the earth be rotting with good things, there is no time to pluck the fruits; the procession scrambles toward the exit sign, and such a panic is there, such a sweat to escape, that the weak and the helpless are trampled into the mud and their cries are unheard.”

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

303. “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

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

— Henry Miller

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement.”

— Henry Miller

309. “In her tight-fitting Persian dress, with turban to match, she looked ravishing.”

— Henry Miller

310. “The sordid qualities imputed to the enemy are always those which we recognize as our own and therefore rise to slay, because only through projection do we realize the enormity and horror of them.”

— Henry Miller

311. “Night has fallen. I’m no longer hungry. I have only an insane desire to be happy. That means I want to share my intoxication with you and everybody. That is maudlin.”

— Henry Miller

312. “One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.”

— Henry Miller

313. “To make absolute, unconditional surrender to the woman one loves is to break every bond save the desire not to lose her, which is the most terrible bond of all.”

— Henry Miller

314. “Words are loneliness. I left a couple of words for you on the tablecloth last night – you covered them with your elbows.”

— Henry Miller

315. “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

316. “They would fight out of a sense of duty and without hatred. That is why France is strong and why she will rise again and resume her place in the world. France has been conquered but not defeated.”

— Henry Miller

317. “For one crime which is expiated in prison ten thousand are committed thoughtlessly by those who condemn.”

— Henry Miller

318. “Her fluency was marvelous. She would say things at random, intricate, flamelike, or slide off into a parenthetical limbo peppered with fireworks – admirable linguistic feats which a practiced writer might struggle for hours to achieve.”

— Henry Miller

319. “It isn’t the oceans which cut us off from the world – it’s the American way of looking at things.”

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

321. “For in Mexico, ladies and gentlemen, it’s always high noon and what glows is fuchsia and what’s dead is dead and no feather-dusters.”

— Henry Miller

322. “The Earth is a paradise, the only one we will ever know. We will realize it the moment we open our eyes. We don’t have to make it a paradise – it is one. We have only to make ourselves fit to inhabit it. The man with the gun, the man with murder in his heart, cannot possibly recognize paradise even when he is shown it.”

— Henry Miller

323. “There is only one thing which interests me vitally now, and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books.”

— Henry Miller

324. “Wine isn’t strong enough. It’s blood I want.”

— Henry Miller

325. “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

326. “The word which gives the key to the national vice is waste. And people who are wasteful are not wise, neither can they remain young and vigorous. In order to transmute energy to higher and more subtle levels one must first conserve it.”

— Henry Miller

327. “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

328. “One can sleep almost anywhere, but one must have a place to work. Even if it’s not a masterpiece you’re doing. Even a bad novel requires a chair to sit on and a bit of privacy.”

— Henry Miller

329. “I might say, in passing, that my life seems to have been one long search for the Mara who would devour all the others and give them significant reality.”

— Henry Miller

330. “Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane.”

— Henry Miller

331. “The Frenchman is first and foremost a man. He is likeable often just because of his weaknesses, which are always thoroughly human, even if despicable.”

— Henry Miller

332. “I want to flee toward a perpetual dawn with a swiftness and relentlessness that leaves no room for remorse, regret, or repentance. I want to outstrip the inventive man who is a curse to the earth in order to stand once again before an impassable deep which not even the strongest wings will enable me to traverse.”

— Henry Miller

333. “Man will change nothing of his final destiny, which is to return sooner or later to the unconscious and the formless.”

— Henry Miller

334. “The concert is a polite form of self induced torture.”

— Henry Miller

335. “I had just made the realization that life is indestructible and that there is no such thing as time, only the present.”

— Henry Miller

336. “I am positively against all this crap which is carried on first in the name of this thing, then in the name of that. I believe only in what is active, immediate, and personal.”

— Henry Miller

337. “I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object.”

— Henry Miller

338. “I even like your deceit, your treachery. It seems aristocratic to me.”

— Henry Miller

339. “Begin this moment, wherever you find yourself, and take no thought of the morrow. Look not to Russia, China, India, not to Washington, not to the adjoining county, city or state, but to your immediate surroundings. Forget Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed and all the others. Do your part to the best of your ability, regardless of the consequences. Above all, do not wait for the next man to follow suit.”

— Henry Miller

340. “The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.”

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

342. “There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of our time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves.”

— Henry Miller

343. “To the man whose senses are alive and alert there is not even the need to stir from one’s threshold.”

— Henry Miller

344. “The secret to a happy life is having lots of interests. Interests are ammunition against despair.”

— Henry Miller

345. “What have we to offer the world beside the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the maniacal delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment?”

— Henry Miller

346. “It was a crushing defeat, but it put iron in my backbone and sulphur in my blood. I knew at least what it was to fail. I knew what it was to attempt something big.”

— Henry Miller

347. “History is the myth, the true myth, of man’s fall made manifest in time.”

— Henry Miller

348. “We defend with our lives the petty principles which divide us. The common principle, which is the establishment of the empire of man on earth, we never lift a finger to defend. We are frightened of any urge which would lift us out of the muck. We fight only for the status quo, our particular status quo. We battle with heads down and eyes closed.”

— Henry Miller

349. “That we cannot rise equal to situations when we are in them – that is the tragedy of life.”

— Henry Miller

350. “For me the book is the man and my book is the man I am, the confused man, the negligent man, the recklass man, the lusty, obscene, boisterous, thoughtful, scrupulous, lying, diabolically thruthful man that I am.”

— Henry Miller