In the beginning was the Word. Man acts it out. He is the act, not the actor.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Creation
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.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Tourism, Attitude, Travel
I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Reading
Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain illusions. It’s a sort of spiritual clap, I should say.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Hope
No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Destiny, Inspiration
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
What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Humankind, Sex
Who hates the Jews more than the Jew?
—Henry Miller
Topics: Jews, Religion, Judaism
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
Topics: Action, Example, Role models
All the lies and evasions by which man has nourished himself—civilization, in a word is the fruits of the creative artist. It is the creative nature of man which has refused to let him lapse back into that unconscious unity with life which characterizes the animal world from which he made his escape.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Creativity
It’s silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are all brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars, hypocrites, poltroons.
—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
Topics: Security, Change, Safety
Don’t look for miracles. You yourself are the miracle.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Miracles
The prisoner is not the one who has committed a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Prison
A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Reading
Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don’t take it too seriously.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Music
The world itself is pregnant with failure, is the perfect manifestation of imperfection, of the consciousness of failure.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Failure
There is something healthy and invigorating about direct action.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Courage
Whenever a taboo is broken, something good happens, something vitalizing. Taboos after all are only hangovers, the product of diseased minds, you might say, of fearsome people who hadn’t the courage to live and who under the guise of morality and religion have imposed these things upon us.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Superstition
All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet—if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Reading, Books, Literature
Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Critics, Criticism
We create our fate every day we live.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Fate
One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Deception/Lying, Lies
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.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Society
In the attempt to defeat death man has been inevitably obliged to defeat life, for the two are inextricably related. Life moves on to death, and to deny one is to deny the other.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Dying, Death
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.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Difficulty
The stabbing horror of life is not contained in calamities and disasters, because these things wake one up and one gets very familiar and intimate with them and finally they become tame again. No, it is more like being in a hotel room in Hoboken let us say, and just enough money in one’s pocket for another meal.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Tragedy, Disasters
Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Books
Actors die so loud.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Actors, Acting
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
Topics: Books, Literature, Reading
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Kurt Vonnegut American Novelist
- Gore Vidal American Novelist
- Elizabeth Gilbert American Novelist
- William S. Burroughs American Novelist
- Anita Loos American Actor
- David Foster Wallace American Novelist, Essayist
- Robert Anton Wilson American Polymath
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Langston Hughes American Poet, Writer
- Nelson Algren American Novelist
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