Words matter. These are the best Henry Miller Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil.
One of the reasons why so few of us ever act, instead of react, is because we are continually stifling our deepest impulses.
We have two American flags always: one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it means danger, revolution, anarchy.
Life is 440 horsepower in a 2-cylinder engine.
Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.
The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.
The legal system is often a mystery, and we, its priests, preside over rituals baffling to everyday citizens.
Analysis brings no curative powers in its train; it merely makes us conscious of the existence of an evil, which, oddly enough, is consciousness.
The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.
Life is constantly providing us with new funds, new resources, even when we are reduced to immobility. In life’s ledger there is no such thing as frozen assets.
The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.
Every man has his own destiny: the only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it leads him.
Instead of asking ‘How much damage will the work in question bring about?’ why not ask ‘How much good? How much joy?’
I see America spreading disaster. I see America as a black curse upon the world. I see a long night settling in and that mushroom which has poisoned the world withering at the roots.
We do not talk – we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests.
Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don’t take it too seriously.
And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words?
Plots and character don’t make life. Life is here and now, anytime you say the word, anytime you let her rip.
One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.
Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement.
Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane.
Why are we so full of restraint? Why do we not give in all directions? Is it fear of losing ourselves? Until we do lose ourselves there is no hope of finding ourselves.
Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.
Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.
Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.
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.
The real enemy can always be met and conquered, or won over. Real antagonism is based on love, a love which has not recognized itself.
What does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it?
When you know what men are capable of you marvel neither at their sublimity nor their baseness. There are no limits in either direction apparently.
Sin, guilt, neurosis; they are one and the same, the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.
The world dies over and over again, but the skeleton always gets up and walks.
The man who is forever disturbed about the condition of humanity either has no problems of his own or has refused to face them.
Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy; I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. What the general reader or the critic makes of them is not my concern.
Los Angeles gives one the feeling of the future more strongly than any city I know of. A bad future, too, like something out of Fritz Lang’s feeble imagination.
Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music – the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.
We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate.
In the beginning was the Word. Man acts it out. He is the act, not the actor.
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.
The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary.
The concert is a polite form of self induced torture.
If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.
An artist is always alone – if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.
I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.
In this age, which believes that there is a short cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is, in the long run, the easiest.
If there is to be any peace it will come through being, not having.
True strength lies in submission which permits one to dedicate his life, through devotion, to something beyond himself.
Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.
One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.
Until we accept the fact that life itself is founded in mystery, we shall learn nothing.
