Henry Miller: Trending quotes

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Henry Miller: 374 quotes79 likes

“I am a free man-and I need my freedom. I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion. I need sunshine and paving tones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself with only the music of my heart for company. What do you want of me? When I have something to say, I put it in print. When I have something to give, I give it. Your prying curiosity turns my stomach! Your compliments humiliate me. Your tea poisons me! I owe nothing to anyone, I would've responsible to God alone-if he exited!”

Henry Miller book Tropic of Cancer

Source: Tropic of Cancer (1934), Chapter Four, Pappin

“Take a good look at me. Now tell me, do you think I'm the sort of fellow who gives a fuck what happens once he's dead?”

Henry Miller book Tropic of Capricorn

Source: Tropic of Capricorn (1939) New York: Grove Press, 1961, p. 313

“If we have not found heaven within, it is a certainty we will not find it without.”

Henry Miller

The Books in My Life (1952) Chapter 11: The Story of My Heart (2nd edition. New York: New Directions Publishing, 1969, p. 192)

“Through it all I learned the value of being humble to the dust, reduced to ashes. Everyone should experience that. Before you can recognize you're somebody, you have to know you're nobody. [-] The butterfly was just a lowly worm in its beginning. The worm didn't live with the moment-to-moment expectation of sprouting wings and taking flight. He lived a useful and productive life, the life of a worm. And he had to die a worm in order to be born as an angel! The spinning of the cocoon is, in and of itself, remarkable. It is as wondrous as the emergence and first flight of the butterfly.”

Henry Miller

Reflections (1981)

“The Happiest peoples, it is said, are those which have no history. Those who have a history, those who have made history seem only to have emphazied through their acomplishments the eternality of struggle. These disappear too eventually, just as those who made no effort, who were content to merely live & enjoy.”

Henry Miller

Source: Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

“I am glad to be a maggot in the corpse which is the world.”

Henry Miller

Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

“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 book The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

With Edgar Varèse in the Gobi Desert http://books.google.com/books?id=jAEY3Kbnj3oC&q="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"&pg=PA172#v=onepage, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945)

“I'm crazy enough to believe that the happiest man on earth is the man with the fewest needs.”

Henry Miller book The Colossus of Maroussi

Source: The Colossus of Maroussi (1941) Part 2, p. 133

“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

“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. In this state of god-like awareness one sings; in this realm the world exists as poem.”

Henry Miller

Source: Wisdom of the Heart

“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

“Whoever uses the spirit that is
in him creatively is an artist. To
make living itself an art, that is
the goal.”

Henry Miller

Source: Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (1957), p. 400

“Life's wildest moment---she kneels on the sidewalk. Everything else she does is lies, lies.”

Henry Miller book Sexus

Source: Sexus

“To be free, as I then knew myself to be, is to realize that all conquest is vain, even the conquest of self, which is the last act of egotism. To be joyous is to carry the ego to its last summit and to deliver it triumphantly. To know peace is total: it is the moment after, when the surrenderer is complete, when there is no longer even the consciounsness of surrender. Peace is at the centre and when it is attainded the voice issues forth in praise and benediction. Then the voice carries far and wide, to the outermost limits of the universe. Then it heals, because it brings light and the warmth of compassion.”

Henry Miller book The Colossus of Maroussi

The Colossus of Maroussi (1941)

“To be generous is to say yes before the man even opens his mouth.”

Henry Miller

Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

“The man who doesn't respond to music, the man without music in his soul is not to be trusted. A man like that is cold and empty, empty to the core.”

Henry Miller

Reflections (1981)

“For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grace, it needs to be blown to smithereens.”

Henry Miller book Tropic of Cancer

Source: Tropic of Cancer (1934), Chapter Two

“I'm a bit retarded, like most Americans.”

Henry Miller book Tropic of Cancer

Source: Tropic of Cancer