Top 500 Henry Miller Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “I am not drunk, and I am not sentimental, and I tell you you are the most wonderful woman in the world.”

— Henry Miller

352. “I will sing while you croak.”

— Henry Miller

353. “Passing beneath the dance hall, thinking again of this book, I realized suddenly that our life had come to an end: I realized that the book I was planning was nothing more than a tomb in which to bury her – and the me which had belonged to her. That was some time ago, and ever since I have been trying to write it. Why is it so difficult? Why? Because the idea of an “end” is intolerable to me.”

— Henry Miller

354. “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

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

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

357. “I struggled in the beginning. I said I was going to write the truth, so help me God. And I thought I was. I found I couldn’t. Nobody can write the absolute truth.”

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

359. “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

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

— Henry Miller

361. “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

362. “Reality is not protected or defended by laws, proclamations, ukases, cannons and armadas. Reality is that which is sprouting all the time out of death and disintegration.”

— Henry Miller

363. “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

364. “A beautiful nap this afternoon that put velvet between my vertebrae.”

— Henry Miller

365. “The worst sin that can be committed against the artist is to take him at his word, to see in his work a fulfillment instead of an horizon.”

— Henry Miller

366. “Keep your exclamation points under control!”

— Henry Miller

367. “There are evidences of a very great art in Europe as long as twenty-five thousand years ago, and in Egypt as far back as sixty thousand years. Money had nothing to to do with the production of these treasures. Money will have nothing to do with the art of the future.”

— Henry Miller

368. “Everything remains unsettled forever, depend on it.”

— Henry Miller

369. “There is nothing in itself which is wrong or evil not even murder.”

— Henry Miller

370. “Everybody goes the wrong way, everything is confused, chaotic, disorderly. But nobody is ever lost or hurt, nothing is stolen, no blows are exchanged. It is a kind of ferment which is created by reason of the fact that for a Greek every event, no matter how stale, is always unique. He is always doing the same thing for the first time: he is curious, avidly curious, and experimental. He experiments for the sake of experimenting, not to establish a better or more efficient way of doing things.”

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

372. “We have so many points in common that it is like looking at myself in a cracked mirror.”

— Henry Miller

373. “Perhaps it was the fact of having no father that pushed him along the road toward the discovery of the self, which is the final process of identification with the world and the realization consequently of the uselessness of ties.”

— Henry Miller

374. “Great God! What have I turned into? What right have you people to clutter up my life, steal my time, probe my soul, suckle my thoughts, have me for your companion, confidant, and information bureau? What do you take me for? Am I an entertainer on salary, required every evening to play an intellectual farce under your stupid noses? Am I a slave, bought and paid for, to crawl on my belly in front of you idlers and lay at your feet all that I do and all that I know?”

— Henry Miller

375. “Leave out the parts that readers tend to skip.”

— Henry Miller

376. “Ideas are living creatures, active and activating, like flowers.”

— Henry Miller

377. “Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty.”

— Henry Miller

378. “Tell me what it is that man can build, to protect himself, which other men cannot destroy? What are we trying to defend? Only what is old, useless, dead, indefensible. Every defense is a provocation to assault. Why not surrender? Why not give – give all? It’s so damned practical, so thoroughly effective and disarming.”

— Henry Miller

379. “Suffering is futile, my intelligence told me over and over, but I went on suffering voluntarily.”

— Henry Miller

380. “There were lots of words which had fallen out of my vocabulary, living abroad so long.”

— Henry Miller

381. “Before I shall have become a man again I shall probably exist as a park, a sort of natural park in which people come to rest, to while away the time. What they say or do will be of little matter, for they will bring only their fatigue, their boredom, their hopelessness.”

— Henry Miller

382. “And there is a time, glorious too in its own way, when one scarcely exists, when one is a complete void. I mean, when boredom seems the very stuff of life.”

— Henry Miller

383. “This keeping oneself alive, out of a blind urge to defeat death, is in itself a means of sowing death. Every one who has not fully accepted life, who is not incrementing life, is helping to fill the world with death.”

— Henry Miller

384. “An artist earns the right to call himself a creator only when he admits to himself that he is but an instrument.”

— Henry Miller

385. “Even if it doesn’t work, there is something healthy and invigorating about direct action.”

— Henry Miller

386. “What was most annoying was that at first blush people usually took me to be good, to be kind, generous, loyal, faithful. Perhaps I did possess these virtues but if so it was because I was indiferent: I could afford to be good, kind, generous, loyal, and so forth, since I was free of envy. Envy was the one thing I was never a victim of. I have never envied anybody or anything. On the contrary, I have only felt pity for everybody and everything.”

— Henry Miller

387. “What does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it?”

— Henry Miller

388. “And inevitably there always crept into our discussions the figure of Whitman, that one lone figure which America has produced in the course of her brief life. In Whitman the whole American scene comes to life, her past and her future, her birth and her death. Whatever there is of value in America Whitman has expressed, and there is nothing more to be said.”

— Henry Miller

389. “You have to be wiped out as a human being in order to be born again an individual.”

— Henry Miller

390. “Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.”

— Henry Miller

391. “If the poet can no longer speak for society, but only for himself, then we are at the last ditch.”

— Henry Miller

392. “I was lonely amidst a world of things lit up by phosphorescent flashes of cruelty. I was delirious with an energy which could not be unleashed except in the service of death and futility.”

— Henry Miller

393. “Why do lovely faces haunt us so? Do extraordinary flowers have evil roots?”

— Henry Miller

394. “To make the world laugh is one thing; to make it happy is quite another. Nobody has even succeeded in doing it.”

— Henry Miller

395. “I had learned to harness ignorance with presumption. I was ready to become an unacknowledged watercolorist.”

— Henry Miller

396. “I haven’t any allegiance, any responsibilities, any hatreds, any worries, any prejudices, any passion. I’m neither for nor against. I’m a neutral.”

— Henry Miller

397. “A great work of art, if it accomplishes anything, serves to remind us, or let us say to set us dreaming, of all that is fluid and intangible.”

— Henry Miller

398. “As far as history goes I am dead. If there is something beyond I shall have to bounce back. I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world which I have departed is a menagerie. The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If a am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself.”

— Henry Miller

399. “Often she would lock herself in her room and sitting before the mirror, apply the makeup of John Barrymore, Barrymore of The Sea Beast or of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Seeing these gruesome images in the mirror she would being to rave. “Who am I?” she would say. “What am I?”

— Henry Miller

400. “We ought to remind ourselves daily, repeat it like a litany, that in our being lies concealed the whole gamut of existence... Above all, we should cease postponing the act of becoming what in fact and essence we are.”

— Henry Miller