Henry Miller Quotes

We create our fate everyday

Until we accept the fact that life itself is founded in mystery, we shall learn nothing.

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.

We create our fate every day . . . most of the ills we suffer from are directly traceable to our own behavior.

The man who is intoxicated with life does not pass judgment, does not seek to come to a conclusion, does not impose his message on the world.

Without a Coca-Cola life is unthinkable.

I soon found out you can't change the world. The best you can do is to learn to live with it.

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.

Man, as man, has never realized himself. The greater part of him, his potential being, has always been submerged. What is history if not the endless story of his repeated failures?

By choosing to live above the ordinary level we create extraordinary problems for ourselves.

Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end.

The poet speaks adequately only when he speaks somewhat wildly... not with intellect alone, but with intellect inebriated by nectar.

Through endless night the earth whirls toward a creation unknown.

The world is the mirror of myself dying.

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.

If one believes, then miracles occur.

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.

We are swimming on the face of time and all else has drowned, is drowning, or will drown.

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.

What is an artist? He's a man who has antennae, who knows how to hook up to the currents which are in atmosphere, in the cosmos.

If the poet can no longer speak for society, but only for himself, then we are at the last ditch.

It isn't the oceans which cut us off from the world - it's the American way of looking at things.

To paint is to love again, and to love is to live life to the fullest.

The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference.

He saw that science had become as great a hoax as religion, that nationalism was a farce, patriotism a fraud, education a form of leprosy, and that morals were for cannibals

I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.

Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.

The world is two thirds spaghetti and meatballs, one third syphilitic chancre.

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

I'm a bit retarded, like most Americans.

Music is the can-opener of the soul.

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

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.

'Life', said Emerson, "consists in what a man is thinking all day." If that be so, then my life is nothing but a big intestine.

The real enemy can always be met and conquered, or won over. Real antagonism is based on love, a love which has not recognized itself.

We do not talk - we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests.

It was only in my forties that I started feeling young.

We must get going. Tomorrow, tomorrow.

Words are loneliness.

Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.

The enchanting, and sometimes terrifying, thing is that the world can be so many things to so many different souls. That it can be, and is, all these things at once and the same time.

I don't think we should read for instruction but to give our souls a chance to luxuriate.

...the wise man knows that every experience is to be viewed as a blessing.

Life is constantly providing us with new funds, new resources, even when we are reduced to immobility. In life's ledger there is no such thing as frozen assets.

For one crime which is expiated in prison ten thousand are committed thoughtlessly by those who condemn.

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.

I made up my mind that I would hold onto nothing, that I would expect nothing.

Somewhere along the way one discovers that what one has to tell is not nearly so important as the telling itself.

For there is only one great adventure and that is inward toward the self, and for that, time nor space nor even deeds matter.

Analysis brings no curative powers in its train; it merely makes us conscious of the existence of an evil, which, oddly enough, is consciousness.