Top 500 Henry Miller Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

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

— Henry Miller

305. “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

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

— Henry Miller

307. “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

Featured in: Book Quotes

308. “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

309. “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

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

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “Music is still the antidote for the nameless... Music is planetary fire, an irreducible which is all sufficient; it is the slate-writing of the gods...”

— Henry Miller

317. “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

Featured in: Book Quotes

318. “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

319. “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

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

— Henry Miller

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

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

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

328. “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

329. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

333. “The prisoner is not the one who has commited a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over.”

— Henry Miller

334. “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

335. “Dondequiera que fuese fomentaba la discordia: no porque fuera idealista, sino porque era como un reflector que revelaba la estupidez y futilidad de todo.”

— Henry Miller

336. “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

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

— Henry Miller

338. “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

339. “What distinguishes the majority of men from the few is their ability to act according to their beliefs.”

— Henry Miller

340. “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

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

341. “I have never seen a place like Paris for varieties of sexual provender. as soon as a woman loses a front tooth or an eye or a leg she goes on the lose. In America she’d starve to death if she had nothing to recommend her but a mutilation. Here it is different. A missing tooth or a nose eaten away or a fallen womb, any misfortune that aggravates the natural homeliness of the female, seems to be regarded as an added spice, a stimulant for the jaded appetites of the male.”

— Henry Miller

342. “Keep your exclamation points under control!”

— Henry Miller

343. “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

344. “I had to learn to think, feel, and see in a totally new fashion, in an uneducated way, in my own way, which is the hardest thing in the world. I had to throw myself into the current, knowing that I would probably sink.”

— Henry Miller

345. “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

346. “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

347. “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

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

— Henry Miller

349. “And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words?”

— Henry Miller

350. “My one thought is to get out of New York, to experience something genuinely American.”

— Henry Miller