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Henry Miller Quotes
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Henry Valentine Miller was an American writer, expatriated in Paris at his flourishing. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms, developing a new sort of semi-autobiographical novel that blended character study, social criticism, philosophical reflection, explicit language, sex, surrealist free association, and mysticism. His most characteristic works of this kind are Tropic of Capricorn, The Colossus of Maroussi, The Time of the Assassins, and The Books in My Life, many of which are based on his experiences in New York and Paris , adding Big Sur and the Oranges of Heronymous Bosch while finally residing in Big Sur, California. He also wrote travel memoirs and literary criticism, and painted watercolors.

✵ 26. December 1891 – 7. June 1980  •  Other names Henry Valentine Miller
Henry Miller photo
Henry Miller: 187 quotes79 likes

Henry Miller Quotes

“Every time you come to the limit of what is demanded of you, you are faced with the same problem-to be yourself!”

Henry Miller book Tropic of Capricorn

Source: Tropic of Capricorn

“He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment.”

Henry Miller book Sexus

Context: A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in....

The Rosy Crucifixion I : Sexus (1949), Chapter 1. (New York: Grove Press, c1965, p. 17-18)

“Jump off. You are a protected individual. Do not fear.”

Henry Miller

“Your nearness is the nearness of planets. I am the void between you. If I withdraw there will be no void for you to swim in.”

Henry Miller book Tropic of Cancer

Source: Tropic of Cancer

“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

“As long as that spark of passion is missing there is no human significance in the performance.”

Henry Miller book Tropic of Cancer

Source: Tropic of Cancer

“Voyages are accomplished inwardly.”

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 book Tropic of Cancer

Source: Tropic of Cancer

“I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.”

Henry Miller book Tropic of Cancer

Source: Tropic of Cancer

“The pygmies are one of the most cultured peoples on the face of the earth. They live a wonderful life, a life of purity. Not only are they busy and productive, they're happy and healthy as well. If we puny Americans had to live under their conditions, we'd perish in a day. Modern man has much to learn from the people he calls 'savages'. Before we are down to the last blade of grass it would be wise to study the life of the Pygmies. The secret of our own survival rests with them, the people who know how to make the most out of very little and find complete happiness with the bare essentials.”

Henry Miller

Reflections (1981)

“Many is the mirage I chased. Always I was overreaching myself. The oftener I touched reality, the harder I bounced back to the world of illusion, which is the name for everyday life. 'Experience! More experience!' I clamored. In a frantic effort to arrive at some kind of order, some tentative working program, I would sit down quietly now and then and spend long, long hours mapping out a plan of procedure. Plans, such as architects and engineers sweat over, were never my forte. But I could always visualize my dreams in a cosmogonic pattern. Though I could never formulate a plot I could balance and weigh opposing forces, characters, situations, events, distribute them in a sort of heavenly lay-out, always with plenty of space between, always with the certitude that there is no end, only worlds within worlds ad infinitum, and that wherever one left off one had created a world, a world finite, total, complete.”

Henry Miller book Plexus

The Rosy Crucifixion II : Plexus (1953)

“The trouble with Buddhism?-- in order to free oneself of all desire, one has to desire to do so.”

Henry Miller

Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

“Vlaminck and Utrillo were very good friends, drinking buddies. One day they attend a funeral. They're walking behind the hearse in a procession, and they're having a great time conversing with one another. They are completely engrossed when suddenly one asks the other, 'Say, don't you smell something funny?' They look up and they're walking behind a garbage truck! They'd lost the hearse in the middle of their enthusiastic conversation.”

Henry Miller

Reflections (1981)

“The Battle is endless…we who babble and froth at the mouth have been at it since eternity.”

Henry Miller

Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

“The Gnostics thought the planet Earth was a cosmic mistake. I too feel that way — I'm through with this Earth before I've even departed from it.”

Henry Miller

Reflections (1981)

“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.”

Henry Miller

Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

“I soon learned that one must give up everything and not do anything else but write, that one must write write write.”

Henry Miller

Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

“Political leaders are never leaders. For leaders we have to look to the Awakeners! Lao Tse, Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, Milarepa, Gurdjiev, Krishnamurti.”

Henry Miller

Source: My Bike & Other Friends (1977), p.12

“Often, when following the trail which meanders over the hills, I pull myself up in an effort to encompass the glory and the grandeur which envelops the whole horizon. Often, when the clouds pile up in the north and the sea is churned with white caps, I say to myself: "This is the California that men dreamed of years ago, this is the Pacific that Balboa looked out on from the Peak of Darien, this is the face of the earth as the Creator intended it to look."”

Henry Miller book Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

Source: Miller, H. (1957). Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, New Directions Books, New York, p. 6.

“Writing is Crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain & sorrow to commemorate an event which is intransmissible.”

Henry Miller

Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

“We’re creators by permission, by grace as it were. No one creates alone, of and by himself. An artist is an instrument that registers something already existent, something which belongs to the whole world, and which, if he is an artist, he is compelled to give back to the world.”

Henry Miller book Sexus

The Rosy Crucifixion I : Sexus (1949)

“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

"Reunion in Brooklyn" http://books.google.com/books?id=uzz94pR0VQsC&q=%22To+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%22&pg=PA131#v=onepage, Sunday After the War (1944)

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

Henry Miller book Black Spring

Black Spring (1938)

“I blush to think of our origins - our hands are steeped in Blood & Crime. And there is no letup to the slaughter and pillage.”

Henry Miller

Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

“I tell you, struggle is what is missing in the lives of most young people today. If they think I'm going to support them while they create great works of art, then they've missed the point of my work, of my life! In the process of becoming a writer or an artist one has to be willing to starve. Struggle is the most invaluable experience of all. Suffering seems to be the inevitable fate of the creative sensitive types. Poverty, disease, death, unrequited love affairs, and disappointments of every sort fan the flame of the artistic spirit. The greatest works of art were not created by spoiled brats. They were born for the most part out of a sense of despair, and if not despair then just plain hard work. Somewhere along the line the artist learns the art of transformation.”

Henry Miller

Reflections (1981)

“The artist who becomes thoroughly aware consequently ceases to be one.”

Henry Miller

Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

“I venerate van Gogh. He was a remarkable human being, a man who knew about love. His work reflects a spirit filled with light, even though his life was a tragedy in many ways.”

Henry Miller

Reflections (1981)

“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.”

Henry Miller

Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

“Wagner wrote an opera titled Tristan and Yseult and in it there is a theme called Love Death theme. It is so sensual, so sexual that he was criticized for having introduced sex into music. And that was quite a few years before the appearance of Elvis Presley!”

Henry Miller

Reflections (1981)

“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 book Sexus

The Rosy Crucifixion I : Sexus (1949), Chapter 14. (New York: Grove Press, c1965, p. 339)

“Things happen or they don't happen, that's all. Nothing is accomplished by sweat and struggle. Nearly everything which we call life is just insomnia, an agony because we've lost the habit of falling asleep.”

Henry Miller

Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

“If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms.”

Henry Miller book The Colossus of Maroussi

The Colossus of Maroussi (1941)

“The truly great writer does not want to write. He wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination.”

Henry Miller

Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

“Every man is working out his destiny in his own way and nobody can be of any help except by being kind, generous, and patient.”

Henry Miller

Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

“As far as Bach is concerned, I never came close to liking him [-] My favourite composer is Scriabin -[and] his Fifth sonata, in my mind, the greatest piece of music ever written.”

Henry Miller

Reflections (1981)

“Obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk.”

Henry Miller

Interview, 1961

“I am against revolutions because they always involve a return to the status quo.”

Henry Miller

Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

“The frantic desire to Live, to live at any cost, is not a result of the life rhythm in us, but of the death rhythm.”

Henry Miller

Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

“It is no accident that propels people like us to Paris. Paris is simply an artificial stage, a revolving stage that permits the spectator to glimpse all phases of the conflict. Of itself Paris initiates no dramas. They are begun elsewhere. Paris is simply an obstetrical instrument that tears the living embryo from the womb and puts it in the incubator. Paris is the cradle of artificial births. Rocking here in the cradle each one slips back into his soil; one dreams back to Berlin, New York, Chicago, Vienna, Minsk,. Vienna is never more Vienna than Paris. Everything is raised to its apotheosis. The cradle gives up its babes and new ones take their place. You can real here on the walls Zola lived and Balzac and Dante and Strindberg and everybody who ever was anything. Everyone has lived here some time or other. Nobody dies here...”

Henry Miller book Tropic of Cancer

Source: Tropic of Cancer (1934), Chapter Two

“More than anything the French have a profound knowledge of the ways of life. They possess a tolerance and an acceptance of the way things are. Problems are faced with intelligence, patience, and a sense of humanity. I have more respect for them than any other nationality on the face of the earth.”

Henry Miller

Reflections (1981)

“Sleep, Napoleon! It was not your ideas they wanted, it was your corpse.”

Henry Miller book Tropic of Cancer

Source: Tropic of Cancer (1934), Chapter Four

“The history of the world is the history of a privileged few.”

Henry Miller

Sunday after the war (1944), pub. New Directions.

“What an astounding thing is the voice! By what miracle is the hot magma of the earth transformed into that which we call speech? If out of clay such an abstract medium as words can be shaped what is to hinder us from leaving our bodies at will and taking up our abode on other planets or between the planets? What is to prevent us from rearranging all life, atomic, molecular, corporeal, stellar, diving? Who or what is powerful enough to eradicate this miraculous leaven which we bear within us like a seed and which, after we have embraced in our mind all the universe, is nothing more than a seed — since to say universe is as easy as to say seed, and we have yet to say greater things, things beyond saying, things limitless and inconceivable, things which no trick of language can encompass.”

Henry Miller book The Colossus of Maroussi

The Colossus of Maroussi (1941)

“There was one artist who wrote as beautifully as he painted. That was Hokusai - He speaks for all artists, whether they are painters or not. [He wrote]: "I have been in love with painting ever since I became conscious of it at the age of six. I drew some pictures I thought fairly good when I was fifty, but really nothing I did before the age of seventy was of any value at all. At seventy three I have at last caught every aspect of nature-birds, fish, animals, insects, trees, grasses, all. When I am eighty I shall have developed still further. And I will really master the secrets of art at ninety. When I reach a hundred my work will be truly sublime, and my final goal will be attained around the age of one hundred and ten, when every line and dot I draw will be imbued with life."”

Henry Miller

Reflections (1981)

“The whole damn universe has to be taken apart, brick by brick, and reconstructed.”

Henry Miller

Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

“A guy who's always interested in the condition of the world, and changing it, either has no problems of his own, or refuses to face them… not wanting to face things of his own nature.”

Henry Miller

Reds (1981)

“I've spoken many times about the Japanese woman. I've praised her again and again. But I have to tell you that I think the Japanese man is the worst. The women are such delicate creatures and they're treated abominably by the men. The Japanese men are pigs - even worse than American men.”

Henry Miller

Reflections (1981)

“There is only one thing which interests me vitally now, and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books.”

Henry Miller book Tropic of Cancer

Source: Tropic of Cancer (1934), Chapter One