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Henry Miller Quotes

Henry Miller

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When you surrender, the problem ceases to exist. Try to solve it, or conquer it, and you only set up more resistance. . . . The most difficult thing to admit, and to realize with one's whole being, is that you alone control nothing. . . .
- Henry Miller
Collection: Trying
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A new world is not made simply by trying to forget the old. A new world is made with a new spirit, with new values. Our world may have begun that way, but today it is caricature. Our world is a world of things. What we dread most, in the face of the impending debacle, is that we shall be obliged to give up our gewgaws, our gadgets, all the little comforts that have made us so uncomfortable. We are not peaceful souls; we are smug, timid, queasy and quaky.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Peace
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Part of the act of creating is in discovering your own kind. They are everywhere. But don't look for them in the wrong places.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Creating
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There's something perverse about women...they're all masochists at heart.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Heart
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Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middle-class men and woman who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will least forever or else are so frightened it won't, that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Men
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To paint is to love again, and to love is to live life to the fullest.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Live Life
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I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous man, the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the man in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable
- Henry Miller
Collection: Lonely
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I found that what I had desired all my life was not to live - if what others are doing is called living - but to express myself.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Found
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To imagine a new world is to live it daily, each thought, each glance, each step, each gesture, killing and recreating, death always a step in advance. To spit on the past is not enough. To proclaim the future is not enough. One must act as if the past were dead and the future unrealizable.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Past
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The Frenchman is first and foremost a man. He is likeable often just because of his weaknesses, which are always thoroughly human, even if despicable.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Men
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We must not just be in the world and above the world, but also of the world. To love it for what it is... is the only task. Avoid it and you are lost. Lose yourself in it, and you are free.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Gratitude
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Topographically the country is magnificent - and terrifying. Why terrifying? Because nowhere else in the world is the divorce between man and nature so complete. Nowhere have I encountered such a dull, monotonous fabric of life as here in America. Here boredom reaches its peak.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Country
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Giving and receiving are at bottom one thing, dependent on whether one lives open or closed. Living openly one becomes a medium, a transmitter; living thus, as a river, one experiences life to the full, flows along with the current of life, and dies in order to live again as an ocean.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Ocean
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Imagination is the voice of the daring.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Voice
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Don't look for miracles. You yourself are the miracle.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Miracle
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There was another thing I heartily disbelieved in - work. Work, it seemed to me even at the threshold of life, is an activity reserved for the dullard. It is the very opposite of creation, which is play… The part of me which was given up to work, which enabled my wife and child to live in the manner which they unthinkingly demanded, this part of me which kept the wheel turning - a completely fatuous, ego-centric notion! - was the least part of me. I gave nothing to the world in fulfilling the function of breadwinner; the world exacted its tribute of me, that was all.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Children
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That we cannot rise equal to situations when we are in them — that is the tragedy of life.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Tragedy
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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
Collection: Book
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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. We don't know how to let go. We're like a Jack-in-the-box perched on top of a spring and the more we struggle the harder it is to get back in the box.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Letting Go
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The monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Men
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The only law which is really lived up to wholeheartedly and with a vengeance is the law of conformity.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Freedom
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But it's just because the chances are all against you, just because there is so little hope, that life is sweet over here.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Sweet
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The smile was so painfully swift and fleeting that it was like the flash of a knife.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Knives
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Life's wildest moment---she kneels on the sidewalk. Everything else she does is lies, lies.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Lying
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The piano bar is the gateway to the halls of masturbation.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Piano
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I'm delirious because I'm dying so fast.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Dying
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Paint what you like and die happy
- Henry Miller
Collection: Paint
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We are swimming on the face of time and all else has drowned, is drowning, or will drown.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Swimming
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When spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Travel
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I like the one about the little soulworms that fly out of the nest for the resurrection.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Poetry
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I couldn't allow myself to think about her very long; if I had I would have jumped off the bridge. It's strange. I had become so reconciled to this life without her, and yet if I thought about her only for a minute it was enough to pierce the bone and marrow of my contentment and shove me back again into the agonizing gutter of my wretched past.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Broken Heart
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I wanted to die; I wanted to surrender because I saw no sense in struggling. I felt that nothing would be proved, substantiated, added or subtracted by continuing an existence which I had not asked for.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Crazy
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I have made a silent compact with myself not to change a line of what I write. I am not interested in perfecting my thoughts, nor my actions.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Writing
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I had to learn, as I soon did, that one must give up everything and not do anything else but write, that one must writer and write and write, even if everybody in the world advises you against it, even if nobody believes in you.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Giving Up
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Whoever uses the spirit that is in him creatively is an artist. To make living itself an art, that is the goal.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Art
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For the artist to attach himself to his work, or identify himself with it, is suicidal.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Suicidal
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Develop an Interest in Life as you see it.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Passion
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I have found God, but he is insufficient.
- Henry Miller
Collection: God
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We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Kings
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I had to learn to think, feel, and see in a totally new fashion, in an uneducated way, in my own way, which is the hardest thing in the world. I had to throw myself into the current, knowing that I would probably sink.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Fashion
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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
Collection: Lying
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One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Vision
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I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous man, the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the man in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Lonely
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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
Collection: Hope
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It was here in Big Sur that I first learned to say ‘amen.’
- Henry Miller
Collection: Firsts
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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
Collection: Book
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We do not talk – we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Reading
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And the books you write. They’re not you. They’re not me sitting here, this Henry Miller. They belong to someone else. It’s terrible. You can never rest.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Book
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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
Collection: Book

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