Quotes from Henry Miller

The prisoner is not the one who has commited a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over.

True strength lies in submission which permits one to dedicate his life, through devotion, to something beyond himself.

Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.

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.

Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed.

What distinguishes the majority of men from the few is their ability to act according to their beliefs.

What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.

Of course you don't die. Nobody dies. Death doesn't exist. You only reach a new level of vision, a new realm of consciousness, a new unknown world.

Without a Coca-Cola life is unthinkable.

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.

Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

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.

We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets - we remember only.

What seems nasty, painful, evil can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind.

One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.

Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement.

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes.

Plots and character don't make life. Life is here and now, anytime you say the word, anytime you let her rip.

The purpose of life is to remember.

Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

And there is a time, glorious too in its own way, when one scarcely exists, when one is a complete void. I mean, when boredom seems the very stuff of life.

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.

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.