Henry Miller Quotes

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
Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation. The other eight are unimportant.
Henry Miller
We create our fate every day ... most of the ills we suffer from are directly traceable to our own behavior.
Henry Miller
The only peace the only security is in fulfillment.
Henry Miller
The man who looks for security even in the mind is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble.
Henry Miller
Example moves the world more than doctrine.
Henry Miller
Every man has his own destiny the only imperative is to follow it to accept it no matter where it leads him.
Henry Miller
If there is to be any peace it will come through being not having.
Henry Miller
We create our fate every day we live.
Henry Miller
Like ships men flounder time and time again.
Henry Miller
Every man has his own destiny the only imperative is to follow it to accept it no matter where it leads him.
Henry Miller
We create our fate every day ... most of the ills we suffer from are directly traceable to our own behavior.
Henry Miller
The only peace the only security is in fulfillment.
Henry Miller
If there is to be any peace it will come through being not having.
Henry Miller
We create our fate every day we live.
Henry Miller
Like ships men flounder time and time again.
Henry Miller
We create our fate every day ... most of the ills we suffer from are directly traceable to our own behavior.
Henry Miller
The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough of is love.
Henry Miller
Life as it is called is for most of us one long postponement.
Henry Miller
One of the reasons why so few of us ever act instead of react is because we are continually stifling our deepest impulses.
Henry Miller
The ordinary man is involved in action the hero acts. An immense difference.
Henry Miller
Destiny is what you are supposed to do in life. Fate is what kicks you in the ass to make you do it.
Henry Miller
The only artists for whom I would make way are - children. For me the paintings of children belong side by side with the works of the masters.
Henry Miller
The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself.
Henry Miller
There is something healthy and invigorating about direct action.
Henry Miller
What distinguishes the majority of men from the few is their ability to act accordingly to their beliefs.
Henry Miller
The world is not to be put in order the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order.
Henry Miller
How speak about an art which no one recognizes as an art? I know that a great deal has already been written about the "art of the cinema". One can read about it most every day in the newspapers & the magazines. But it is not the art of the cinema which you will find discussed therein--it is rather dire, botched embryo as it now stands revealed before our eyes, the still-birth which was mangled in the womb by the obstetricians of art.
Henry Miller
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
1) Work on one thing at a time until finished.2) Start no more new books, add no more new material to "Black Spring."3) Don't be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.4) Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!5) When you can't create you can work.6) Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.7) Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.8) Don't be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure
Henry Miller
My one thought is to get out of New York, to experience something genuinely American.
Henry Miller
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
The most difficult thing to adjust to, apparently, is peace and contentment.
Henry Miller
If at eighty you're not a cripple or an invalid, if you have your health, if you still enjoy a good walk, a good meal (with all the trimmings), if you can sleep without first taking a pill, if birds and flowers, mountains and sea still inspire you, you are a most fortunate individual and you should get down on your knees morning and night and thank the good Lord for his savin' and keepin' power. If you are young in years but already weary in spirit, already on your way to becoming an automaton, it may do you good to say to your boss - under your breath, of course - "Fuck you, Jack! you don't own me." If you can whistle up your ass, if you can be turned on by a fetching bottom or a lovely pair of teats, if you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from going sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you've got it half licked.
Henry Miller
either you take in believing in miracles or you stand still like the hummingbird.
Henry Miller
For the moment I can think of nothing— except that I am a sentient being stabbed by the miracle of these waters that reflect a forgotten world.
Henry Miller
We have no need for genius - genius is dead. We have need for strong hands, for spirits who are willing to give up the ghost and put on flesh...
Henry Miller
Every day that we fail to live out the maximum of our potentialities we kill the Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, Christ which is in us.
Henry Miller
Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.
Henry Miller
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
No stone was laid upon· another with love or reverence; no street was laid for dance or joy. One thing has been added to another in a mad scramble to fill the belly, and the streets smell of empty bellies and full bellies and bellies half full. The streets smell of a hunger which has nothing to do with love; they smell of thc belly which is insatiable and of the creations of the cmpty helly which are null and void.
Henry Miller
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
That we cannot rise equal to situations when we are in them — that is the tragedy of life.
Henry Miller
When a situation gets so bad that no solution seems possible there is left only murder and suicide, or both. These failing, one becomes a buffoon.
Henry Miller
But you can’t put fight into a man’s guts if hehasn’t any fight in him. There are some of us so cowardly that youcan’t ever make heroes of us, not even if you frighten us to death.We know too much, maybe. There are some of us who don’t live in themoment, who live a little ahead, or a little behind.
Henry Miller
He read as much as his curiosity demanded - which is to say all
Henry Miller
Over and over again I have said that there is no way out of the present impasse. If we were wide awake we would be instantly struck by the horrors which surround us ... We would drop our tools, quit our jobs, deny our obligations, pay no taxes, observe no laws, and so on. Could the man or woman who is thoroughly awakened possibly do the crazy things which are now expected of him or her every moment of the day?
Henry Miller
I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous [person], the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the [person] in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable.
Henry Miller
I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a chance to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard - and in order to forget.
Henry Miller
I saw the errors I had made and assumed full responsibility for everything.
Henry Miller
It is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis.
Henry Miller
A beautiful nap this afternoon that put velvet between my vertebrae.
Henry Miller
For the man in the paddock, whose duty is is to sweep up manure,the supreme terror is the possibility of a world without horses. Totell him that it is disgusting to spend one’s life shoveling up hotturds is a piece of imbecility. A man can get to love shit if hislivelihood depends on it, if his happiness is involved.
Henry Miller
I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse.
Henry Miller
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
It’s best to keep America just like that, always in the background, a sort of picture post card which you look at in a weak moment. Like that, you imagine it’s always there waiting for you, unchanged, unspoiled, a big patriotic open space with cows and sheep and tenderhearted men ready to bugger everything in sight, man, woman or beast. It doesn’t exist, America. It’s a name you give to an abstract idea…
Henry Miller
It's best to keep America just like that, always in the background, a sort of picture post card which you look at in a weak moment. Like that, you imagine it's always there waiting for you, unchanged, unspoiled....It doesn't exist, America. It's a name you give to an abstract idea.
Henry Miller
If this was the true self it was marvelous and what’s more it seemed never to change but always to pick up from the last stop, to continue in the same vein, a vein I had struck when I was a child and went down in the street for the first time alone and there frozen into the dirty ice of the gutter lay a dead cat, the first time I had looked at death and grasped it. From that moment I knew what it was to be isolated: every object, every living thing and every dead thing led its independent existence. My thoughts too led to an independent existence.
Henry Miller
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
The world around me is dissolving leaving here and there spots of time. The world is a cancer eating itself away.
Henry Miller