Top 500 Henry Miller Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

402. “To live without killing is a thought which could electrify the world, if men were only capable of staying awake long enough to let the idea soak in.”

— Henry Miller

403. “The Greek knows how to live with his rags: they don’t utterly degrade and befoul him as in other countries I have visited.”

— Henry Miller

404. “It seems to me that everything dates from that aborted affair.”

— Henry Miller

405. “Instead of asking ‘How much damage will the work in question bring about?’ why not ask ‘How much good? How much joy?’”

— Henry Miller

406. “Going through the pass, which demands a sort of swastika maneuvering in order to debouch free and clear on the high plateau, I had the impression of wading through phantom seas of blood; the earth was not parched and convulsed in the usual Greek way but bleached and twisted as must have been the mangled, death-stilled limbs of the slain who were left to rot and give their blood here in the merciless sun to the roots of the wild olives which cling to the steep mountain slope with vulturous claws.”

— Henry Miller

407. “Zeven jaar lang heb ik dag en nacht met slechts een gedachte voor mijn geest rongelopen – haar. Als er maar een christen was die zo trouw aan zijn God was als ik aan haar, dan zouden we vandaag allemaal Jezus Christus zijn. Dag en nacht dacht ik aan haar, zelfs als ik haar bedroog.”

— Henry Miller

408. “I was polluting the bed with dreams.”

— Henry Miller

409. “No, we are never alone. But one has to live apart to know it for the truth.”

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

411. “This isn’t the place to complain about the punctilio of prison regimes. I know that they have to take every precaution. All I wish to convey is the effect which this individual had upon me. Months have passed since the incident and yet I can’t forget his face, his manner, his whole being. He’s a man, and I say it calmly and soberly, whom I could kill in cold blood. I could shoot him down in the dark and go quietly about my business, as if I had just brushed a mosquito off my arm.”

— Henry Miller

412. “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

413. “Such a healthy, simple, approving glance as if he were saying to himself: “Ah, spring is coming!” And God knows, when spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise.”

— Henry Miller

414. “Perhaps I have not lined his portrait too clearly. But if he exists, if only for the reason that I have imagined him to be. He came from the blue and returns to the blue. He has not perished, he is not lost. Neither will he be forgotten.”

— Henry Miller

415. “Give me a few days of peace in your arms – I need it terribly. I’m ragged, worn, exhausted. After that I can face the world.”

— Henry Miller

416. “I demanded a realm in which I should be both master and slave at the same time: The world of art is the only such realm.”

— Henry Miller

417. “It’s terrible to be civilized, because when you come to the end of the world you have nothing to support the terror of loneliness.”

— Henry Miller

418. “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

419. “She stood there waiting for me to approach, as though absolutely certain that I would take her by the arm and continue strolling down the avenue.”

— Henry Miller

420. “No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.”

— Henry Miller

421. “The ten-o’ clock breakfasters began to appear: nervous, little men, morose, preoccupied, who wiped their plates with crusts of bread; rude, massive women who, like primitive idols dug out of the soil, had grown rotten in the years; flowery dandies with repulsive faces, reminding him uncomfortably of illustrations in medical tracts.”

— Henry Miller

422. “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

423. “A simple phrase may record a year’s struggle.”

— Henry Miller

424. “Even if one’s whole life were a mistake, there is always time to change.”

— Henry Miller

425. “In the egocentric prism the helpless victim is walled in by the very light which he refracts. The ego dies in its own glass cage...”

— Henry Miller

426. “The poet speaks only to the poet. Spirit answereth spirit. The rest is hogwash.”

— Henry Miller

427. “When one spends what he has on himselef, when one has a thoroughly good time with his own money, people are apt to say “he doesn’t know what to do with his money.”

— Henry Miller

428. “New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves... A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness. Meaningless. Absolute meaningless.”

— Henry Miller

429. “Maybe I only thought I was in love. Maybe I was simply hungry, lonely, a clay pigeon any one could put away with a toy pistol.”

— Henry Miller

430. “I like the monologue even more than the duet, when it is good. It’s like watching a man write a book expressly for you: he writes it, reads it aloud, acts it, revises it, savours it, enjoys it, enjoys your enjoyment of it, and then tears it up and throws it to the winds. It’s a sublime performance, because while he’s going through with it you are God for him – unless you happen to be an insensitive and impatient dolt. But in that case the kind of monologue I refer to never happens.”

— Henry Miller

431. “You must be life for me to the very end,” so he writes. “That is the only way in which to sustain my idea of you. Because you have gotten, as you see, tied up with something so vital to me, I do not think I shall ever shake you off. Nor do I wish to. I want you to live more vitally every day, as I am dead. That is why, when I speak of you to others, I am just a bit ashamed. It’s hard to talk of one’s self so intimately.”

— Henry Miller

432. “I believe everything you tell me, but I know that it will all turn out differently.”

— Henry Miller

433. “I tried to look earnest, but I only succeeded in looking pathetic.”

— Henry Miller

434. “She felt that in everything, sublime or ignoble, there was hidden a turbulent, a vital force, a significance and beauty which art, however glorious, was but a pale refection. “I want to live!” she muttered wildly. “I want to live!”

— Henry Miller

435. “Heroism and obscenity appear no more important in the life of the universe than the fighting or mating of a pair of insects in the woods. All is on the same plane.”

— Henry Miller

436. “I expected so much, so much of the world and it all fell short.”

— Henry Miller

437. “He falls on her lap and lies there quivering like a toothache.”

— Henry Miller

438. “Men are lonely and out of communication with one another because all their inventions speak only of death. Death is the automaton which rules the world of activity. Death is silent, because it has no mouth. Death has never expressed anything. Death is wonderful too – after life.”

— Henry Miller

439. “We are, most of us, sleepwalkers, and we die without ever opening our eyes.”

— Henry Miller

440. “She wanted them to argue with her, to gush, to rhapsodize. She wanted them to sparkle, not to chew. Words... words... words... She gobbled them up, spewed them out again, added them up, juggled them, nursed them along, carried them to bed and put them under the pillow like soiled pajamas, slept on them, snored over them. Words... When every other memory of her had fled there would remain-HER WORDS.”

— Henry Miller

441. “If you can’t give the is-ness of a thing give the not-ness of it! The main thing is to hook up, get the wheels turning, sound off. When your brakes jam, try going in reverse. If often works.”

— Henry Miller

442. “Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don’t take it too seriously.”

— Henry Miller

443. “To taste it once is to taste it forever – life or death. Whichever way the coin flips is right, so long as you hold no stakes.”

— Henry Miller

444. “Some of the things you say are sublime and monstrous at once.”

— Henry Miller

445. “Better to separate than never to marry.”

— Henry Miller

446. “Can you stop dead, and without thinking, radiate the truth which you know?”

— Henry Miller

447. “I like the one about the little soulworms that fly out of the nest for the resurrection.”

— Henry Miller

448. “The whole world seemed to unroll like a pornographic film whose tragic theme is impotence.”

— Henry Miller

449. “It’s like saying to a drowning man: What a pity, what a pity! If you had only let me teach you how to swim! Everybody wants to right the world, nobody wants help his neighbor. They want to make a man of you without taking your body into consideration. It’s all cockeyed.”

— Henry Miller

450. “You can’t make people joyous just by being joyous yourself. Joy has to be generated by oneself: it is or it isn’t. Joy is founded on something too profound to be understood and communicated. To be joyous is to be a madman in a world of sad ghosts.”

— Henry Miller