Henry Miller Quotations

Henry Valentine Miller American writer

Tropic of Cancer

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty ... what you will.
- Tropic of Cancer (1934)

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

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.

I am crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, for grander failures. I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want everyone to scratch himself to death.

Still prowling around. Mid-afternoon. Guts rattling. Beginning to rain now. Notre-Dame rises tomb-like from the water. The gargoyles lean far out over the lace facade. They hang there like an idee fixe in the mind of a monomaniac. An old man with yellow whiskers approaches me. Has some Jaworski nonsense in his hand. Comes up to me with his head thrown back and the rain splashing in his face turns the golden sands to mud.

All the men she's been with and now you, just you, and the barges going by, masts and hulls, the whole damned current of life flowing through you, through her, through all the guys behind you and after you, the flowers and the birds and the sun streaming in and the fragrance of it choking you, annihilating you.

I knew I wouldn't ever trade all this whirling about my head for Russia or heaven or anything on earth.

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

I hear not a word because she is beautiful and I love her and now I am happy & willing to die.

For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood.

Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy.

Other works

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)

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.
- The Colossus of Maroussi (1941)

If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms.
- The Colossus of Maroussi (1941)

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.
- The Colossus of Maroussi (1941)

Moralities, ethics, laws, customs, beliefs, doctrines - these are of trifling import. All that matters is that the miraculous become the norm.
- Black Spring (1938)

Obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk.
- Interview, 1961

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.
- The Rosy Crucifixion I : Sexus (1949)

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)

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

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.
- The Rosy Crucifixion II : Plexus (1953)

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.
- The Wisdom of the Heart (1951)

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.
- Tropic of Capricorn (1939)

She was to me, and still is, the greatest person I have known - one who can truly be called a "devoted" soul. I owe her everything.
- Letters of Henry Miller and Wallace Fowlie (1975)

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.
- The Books in My Life (1952) Preface (2nd edition. New York: New Directions Publishing, 1969, p. 12)

If we have not found heaven within, it is a certainty we will not find it without.
- The Books in My Life (1952) Chapter 11: The Story of My Heart (2nd edition. New York: New Directions Publishing, 1969, p. 192)

Through art then, one finally establishes contact with reality: that is the great discovery. Here all is play and invention; there is no solid foothold from which to launch the projectiles which will pierce the miasma of folly, ignorance and greed. The world has not to be put in order: the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order, to know what is the world order in contradistinction to the wishful-thinking orders which we seek to impose on one another. The power which we long to possess, in order to establish the good, the true and the beautiful, would prove to be, if we could have it, but the means of destroying one another. It is fortunate that we are powerless.
- From: Miller, H. (1969). “Creation,” The Henry Miller Reader. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation. p.33.

Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Perhaps the artist is nothing more than the personification of this universal maladjustment, this universal disequilibrium.

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.

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

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

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

Everything remains unsettled forever, depend on it.

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

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

Attributed

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.

Every man has his own destiny: The only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it leads him.

I see America spreading disaster. I see America as a black curse upon the world.

More obscene than anything is inertia.

No matter how vast, how total, the failure of man here on earth, the work of man will be resumed elsewhere. War leaders talk of resuming operations on this front and that, but man's front embraces the whole universe.

Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation- the other eight are unimportant.

Writing is its own reward.

So I was at liberty, let us say, to write something about Coney Island in winter. If they liked it it would appear in print, my name would be signed to it, and I could show it to my friends, carry it about with me, put it under my pillow at night, read it surreptitiously, over and over, because the first time you see yourself in print you're beside yourself, you've at last proved to the world that you really are a writer, and you must prove it to the world, at least once in your life, or you will go mad from believing it all by yourself. And so to Coney Island on a wintry day. Alone, of course. It wouldn't do to have one's reflections and observations diverted by a trivial-minded friend. A new pad in my pocket and a sharp pencil.

The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough of is love.

The real leader has no need to lead - he is content to point the way.

To enter life by way of vagina is as good a way as any

We are dancing in the hollow of the cup of nothingness. We are of one flesh, but separated like stars.

Love is complete and utter surrender.

I have never regretted anything. Regret, like guilt, is a waste of time.

Quoternity