Top 500 Henry Miller Quotes (2026 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. “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

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

— Henry Miller

354. “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

355. “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

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

— Henry Miller

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

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

— Henry Miller

361. “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

362. “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

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

— Henry Miller

364. “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

365. “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

366. “I will sing while you croak.”

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

369. “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

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

— Henry Miller

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

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

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

377. “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

378. “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

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

— Henry Miller

380. “A good lie reveals more than the truth can ever reveal.”

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

383. “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

384. “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

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

— Henry Miller

386. “The moment I stepped on the American boat which was to take me to New York I felt I was in another world. I was among the go-getters again, among the restless souls, who, not knowing how to live their own life, wish to change the world for everybody.”

— Henry Miller

387. “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

388. “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

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

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

391. “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

392. “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

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

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

395. “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

396. “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

397. “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

Featured in: Book Quotes, Reading Quotes

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

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller