Quotes from Henry Miller

Certainly paradise, whatever, wherever it be, contains flaws. (Paradisical flaws, if you like.) If it did not, it would be incapable of drawing the hearts of men or angels.

The man who is forever disturbed about the condition of humanity either has no problems of his own or has refused to face them.

The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal.

No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.

Most of the ills we suffer from are directly traceable to our own behavior... Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense. There is no mystery about disease, nor crime, nor war, nor the thousand and one things which plague us. Live simply and wisely.

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.

Work on one thing at a time until finished.

If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms.

Instead of asking 'How much damage will the work in question bring about?' why not ask 'How much good? How much joy?'

When you can't create you can work

For the artist to attach himself to his work, or identify himself with it, is suicidal.

There is nothing strange about fear: no matter in what guise it presents itself it is something with which we are all so familiar that when a man appears who is without it we are at once enslaved by him.

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

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would be realize it, than to ccept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring, through obeying the blind urge

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would be realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

Reality is not protected or defended by laws, proclamations, ukases, cannons and armadas. Reality is that which is sprouting all the time out of death and disintegration.

The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order.

The tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on my face. Thousands and thousands of us, and we're passing one another without a look of recognition.

The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal.

The word which gives the key to the national vice is waste. And people who are wasteful are not wise, neither can they remain young and vigorous. In order to transmute energy to higher and more subtle levels one must first conserve it.

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.

To call this a society of free peoples is blasphemous. What have we to offer the world beside the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the maniacal delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment?