Quotes by
Henry Miller |
1891-1980 , American writer
American writer and a Bohemian whose autobiographical novels achieve a candour—particularly about sex—that made them a liberating influence in mid-20th-century literature. His most characteristic works are Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, Tropic of Capricorn and The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy (Sexus, Nexus, and Plexus), which are based on his experiences in New York and Paris.
Because of their sexual frankness, his major works were banned in Britain and the United States until the 1960s.
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Quotations
| • | Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning. 15 |
| • | Destiny is what you are supposed to do in life. Fate is what kicks you in the ass to make you do it. 7 |
| • | It is with the soul that we grasp the essence of another human being, not with the mind, nor even with the heart. 7 |
| • | We are swimming on the face of time and all else has drowned, is drowning, or will drown. 6 |
| • | The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference. 6 |
| • | Obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk. 6 |
| • | One's destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things. 6 |
| • | There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature. 5 |
| • | The trouble with Buddhism: in order to free oneself of all desire, one has to desire to do so. 5 |
| • | Why change the world? Change worlds! 4 |
| • | Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood. 4 |
| • | Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything. (Tropic of Capricorn, 1939) 4 |
| • | If we have not found heaven within, it is a certainty we will not find it without. 3 |
| • | In expanding the field of knowledge we but increase the horizon of ignorance. 2 |
| • | Back of every creation, supporting it like an arch, is faith. Enthusiasm is nothing: it comes and goes. But if one believes, then miracles occur. 2 |
| • | Music is the can-opener of the soul. 2 |
| • | Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music – the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself. 2 |
| • | To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself. 2 |
| • | I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth. 1 |
| • | To be joyous is to be a madman in a world of sad ghosts. 1 |
| • | Serenity is when you get above all this, when it doesn't matter what they think, say or want, but when you do as you are, and see God and Devil as one. 1 |
| • | Everybody says sex is obscene. The only true obscenity is war. 1 |
| • | I don't know whether you've ever had a woman eat an apple while you were doing it. Well, you can imagine how that affects you. 1 |
| • | Do not be duped by little duties. Do not be a chore man all your days. 1 |
| • | It is no accident that propels people like us to Paris. 1 |
| • | Greece is the home of the gods; they may have died but their presence still makes itself felt. The gods were of human proportion: they were created out of the human spirit. 1 |
| • | 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. 1 |
| • | My hunger and curiosity drive me forward in all directions at once. 1 |
| • | Don't look for miracles. You yourself are the miracle. 1 |
| • | I demanded a realm in which I should be both master and slave at the same time: The world of art is the only such realm. 1 |
| • | Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing. 1 |
| • | There's something perverse about women...they're all masochists at heart. 1 |
| • | There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy. 1 |
| • | I'm an egotist, but I'm not selfish. There's a difference. I'm a neurotic, I guess. I can't stop thinking about myself. It isn't that I think myself so important. I simply can't think about anything else, that's all. 1 |
| • | Hitler is no worse, nay better, in my opinion, than the other lugs. He makes the German mistake of being tactless, that's all. 1 |
| • | What seems nasty, painful, evil can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. 1 |
| • | Keep your exclamation points under control! 1 |
| • | The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself. All that you despise, all that you loathe, all that you reject, all that you condemn and seek to convert by punishment springs from you. 1 |
| • | The best technique is none at all. 1 |
| • | The learning we received only tended to obscure our vision. From the day we went to school we learned nothing; on the contrary, we were made obtuse, we were wrapped in a fog of words and abstractions. 1 |
| • | Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously. 1 |
| • | Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement. 1 |
| • | What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse. 1 |
| • | There's nothing wrong with the world. What's wrong is our way of looking at it. 1 |
| • | The light of Greece opened my eyes, penetrated my pores, expanded my whole being. 1 |
| • | At Epidaurus, in the stillness, in the great peace that came over me, I heard the heart of the world beat. I know what the cure is: it is to give up, to relinquish, to surrender, so that our little hearts may beat in unison with the great heart of the world. 1 |
| • | You have to write a million words before you find your voice as a writer. 1 |
| • | In the beginning was the Word. Man acts it out. He is the act, not the actor. 1 |
| • | I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object. 1 |
| • | The poet speaks adequately only when he speaks somewhat wildly... not with intellect alone, but with intellect inebriated by nectar. 1 |
| • | Chaos is the score upon which reality is written. 1 |
| • | Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy. 1 |
| • | Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed. 1 |
| • | It was only in my forties that I started feeling young. 1 |
| • | If you can fall in love again and again if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical you've got it half licked. 1 |
| • | 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. 1 |
| • | Surely every one realizes, at some point along the way, that he is capable of living a far better life than the one he has chosen. 1 |
| • | It is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis. 1 |
| • | Every day that we fail to live out the maximum of our potentialities we kill the Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, Christ which is in us. 1 |
| • | The imperfections of a man, his frailties, his faults, are just as important as his virtues.You can't separate them. They're wedded. 1 |
| • | An artist earns the right to call himself a creator only when he admits to himself that he is but an instrument. 1 |
| • | An artist is always alone – if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness. 1 |
| • | I soon found out you can’t change the world. The best you can do is to learn to live with it. 1 |
| • | All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience. 1 |
| • | Why are we so full of restraint? Why do we not give in all directions? Is it fear of losing ourselves? Until we do lose ourselves there is no hope of finding ourselves. 1 |
| • | Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such. 1 |
| • | Man has demonstrated that he is master of everything – except his own nature. 1 |
| • | Everything hinges on how you look at things. 1 |
| • | Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring. 1 |
| • | Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. 1 |
| • | The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough is love. 1 |
| • | The goal of life is not to possess power but to radiate it. 1 |
| • | A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. 1 |
| • | It is silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars and hypocrites. 1 |
| • | The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself. 1 |
| • | Political leaders are never leaders. For leaders we have to look to the Awakeners! Lao Tse, Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, Milarepa, Gurdjiev, Krishnamurti. 1 |
| • | The artist who becomes thoroughly aware consequently ceases to be one. 1 |
| • | I am against revolutions because they always involve a return to the status quo. 1 |
| • | Everything remains unsettled forever, depend on it. 1 |
| • | 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. 1 |
| • | To be generous is to say yes before the man even opens his mouth. 1 |
| • | 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. 1 |
| • | No life in the whole history of man has been so misinterpreted, so woefully misunderstood as Christ's. 1 |
| • | All about us we see a world in revolt; but revolt is negative, a mere finishing-off process. In the midst of destruction we carry with us also our creation, our hopes, our strength, our urge to be fulfilled. 1 |
| • | Sleep, Napoleon! It was not your ideas they wanted, it was your corpse. 1 |
| • | I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. 1 |
| • | 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. 1 |
| • | 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, in the long run, is the easiest. 1 |
| • | The blind lead the blind, it's the democratic way. 1 |
| • | The history of the world is the history of a privileged few. 1 |
| • | If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. (The Colossus of Maroussi, 1941) 1 |
| • | Take a good look at me. Now tell me, do you think I'm the sort of fellow who gives a f… what happens once he's dead? 1 |
| • | The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. (Tropic of Capricorn, 1939) 1 |
Funny Quotes
| • | Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation... The other eight are unimportant. 3 |
| • | When shit becomes valuable, the poor will be born without assholes. 1 |
