Henry Miller quotes

“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.”

— Henry Miller

“Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane.”

— 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 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

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

— Henry Miller

“The world is the mirror of myself dying.”

— Henry Miller

“We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate.”

— Henry Miller

“What distinguishes the majority of men from the few is their ability to act according to their beliefs.”

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

“What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.”

— Henry Miller

“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.”

— Henry Miller

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

— Henry Miller

“Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.”

— Henry Miller

“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.”

— Henry Miller

“It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.”

— Henry Miller

“It isn't the oceans which cut us off from the world - it's the American way of looking at things.”

— Henry Miller

“Moralities, ethics, laws, customs, beliefs, doctrines - these are of trifling import. All that matters is that the miraculous become the norm.”

— Henry Miller

“No matter how vast, how total, the failure of man here on earth, the work of man will be resumed elsewhere. War leaders talk of resuming operations on this front and that, but man's front embraces the whole universe.”

— Henry Miller

“Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.”

— Henry Miller

“Plots and character don't make life. Life is here and now, anytime you say the word, anytime you let her rip.”

— Henry Miller

“The concert is a polite form of self induced torture.”

— Henry Miller

“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.”

— Henry Miller

“The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive.”

— Henry Miller

“The Teutons have been singing the swan song ever since they entered the ranks of history. They have always confounded truth with death.”

— Henry Miller

“The world dies over and over again, but the skeleton always gets up and walks.”

— Henry Miller

“The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order.”

— Henry Miller

“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

“There is nothing strange about fear: no matter in what guise it presents itself it is something with which we are all so familiar that when a man appears who is without it we are at once enslaved by him.”

— Henry Miller

“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

“We live at the edge of the miraculous.”

— Henry Miller