Henry Miller Quotes - Page 15

Quotes about:

• The piano bar is the gateway to the halls of masturbation.

  Henry Miller

  Piano, Romance, Bars

  4 Copy quote

• Things happen or they don't happen, that's all. Nothing is accomplished by sweat and struggle. Nearly everything which we call life is just insomnia, an agony because we've lost the habit of falling asleep. We don't know how to let go. We're like a Jack-in-the-box perched on top of a spring and the more we struggle the harder it is to get back in the box.

  Henry Miller

  Letting Go, Spring, Struggle

  Henry Miller (1964). “Henry Miller on Writing”, New Directions Publishing

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Henry Miller

  Art, Book, Destiny

  Tropic of Cancer ch. 1 (1934)

  10 Copy quote

• But it's just because the chances are all against you, just because there is so little hope, that life is sweet over here.

  Henry Miller

  Sweet, Littles, Chance

  Henry Miller (1977). “Tropic of Cancer”

  4 Copy quote

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

  Henry Miller

  Damage Is Done, Joy, Why Not

  Henry Miller (1970). “The Air-conditioned Nightmare”, p.172, New Directions Publishing

  8 Copy quote

• Men are not suffering from the lack of good literature, good art, good theatre, good music, but from that which has made it impossible for these to become manifest. In short, they are suffering from the silent shameful conspiracy (the more shameful since it is unacknowledged) which has bound them together as enemies of art and artists.

  Henry Miller

  Art, Men, Enemy

  Henry Miller (1957). “Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch”, p.57, New Directions Publishing

  4 Copy quote

• I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a chance to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard - and in order to forget.

  Henry Miller

  Eye, Cities, Order

  4 Copy quote

• The poem is the dream made flesh, in a two-fold sense: as work of art, and as life, which is a work of art.

  Henry Miller

  Dream, Art, Two

  Henry Miller (1941). “The Wisdom of the Heart”, p.4, New Directions Publishing

  4 Copy quote

• But you can’t put fight into a man’s guts if he hasn’t any fight in him. There are some of us so cowardly that you can’t ever make heroes of us, not even if you frighten us to death. We know too much, maybe. There are some of us who don’t live in the moment, who live a little ahead, or a little behind.

  Henry Miller

  Hero, Fighting, Men

  Henry Miller, Norman Mailer (1976). “Genius and lust: a journey through the major writings of Henry Miller”, Grove Press

  4 Copy quote

• 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. Not one of us is intact, and yet we have in us all the continents and the seas between the continents and the birds of the air. We are going to put it down ― the evolution of this world which has died but which has not been buried.

  Henry Miller

  Crazy, Men, Our World

  Henry Miller, John Calder (1985). “A Henry Miller reader”, Riverrun Pr

  6 Copy quote

• The monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses.

  Henry Miller

  Men, Rose, Want

  Henry Miller (1977). “Tropic of Cancer”

  6 Copy quote

• When spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise.

  Henry Miller

  Travel, Spring, Paris

  Henry Miller (1961). “Tropic of Cancer”

  10 Copy quote

• I'm delirious because I'm dying so fast.

  Henry Miller

  Dying, Delirious

  4 Copy quote

• Human beings make a strange fauna and flora. From a distance they appear negligible; close up they are apt to appear ugly and malicious. More than anything they need to be surrounded with sufficient space―space even more than time.

  Henry Miller

  Distance, Space, Needs

  Henry Miller (1959). “The Henry Miller Reader”, p.36, New Directions Publishing

  4 Copy quote

• Each man has his own way of being himself and of saying it so ultimately that he can't be denied.

  Henry Miller

  Men, Individuality, Way

  4 Copy quote

• The smile was so painfully swift and fleeting that it was like the flash of a knife.

  Henry Miller

  Knives, Fleeting, Flash

  Henry Miller, John Calder (1985). “A Henry Miller reader”, Riverrun Pr

  4 Copy quote

• My understanding of the meaning of a book is that the book itself disappears from sight, that it is chewed alive, digested and incorporated into the system as flesh and blood which in turn creates new spirit and reshapes the world.

  Henry Miller

  Book, Sight, Blood

  Henry Miller (1966). “Tropic of Capricorn”

  4 Copy quote

• Understanding is not a piercing of the mystery, but an acceptance of it, a living blissfully with it, in it, through and by it.

  Henry Miller

  Writing, Acceptance, Understanding

  Henry Miller (1964). “Henry Miller on Writing”, New Directions Publishing

  4 Copy quote

• When one is trying to do something beyond his known powers it is useless to seek the approval of friends. Friends are at their best in moments of defeat.

  Henry Miller

  Friendship, Power, Appreciate

  Henry Miller (2007). “Sexus: The Rosy Crucifixion I”, p.28, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  8 Copy quote

• The wallpaper with which the men of science have covered the world of reality is falling to tatters. The grand whorehouse which they have made of life requires no decoration; it is essential that only the drains function adequately. Beauty, that feline beauty that has us by the balls in America, is finished.

  Henry Miller

  Fall, Reality, Men

  4 Copy quote

• One can see now how the idea of heaven takes hold of men's consciousness, how it gains ground even when all the props have been knocked from under it. There must be another world beside this swamp in which everything is dumped pell-mell. It's hard to imagine what it can be like, this heaven that men dream about.

  Henry Miller

  Dream, Men, Ideas

  Henry Miller (1977). “Tropic of Cancer”

  4 Copy quote

• And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words?

  Henry Miller

  Men, Literature, Divine

  Henry Miller (1957). “Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch”, p.320, New Directions Publishing

  6 Copy quote

• Until he [man] has become fully human, until he learns to conduct himself as a member of the earth, he will continue to create gods who will destroy him. The tragedy of Greece lies not in the destruction of a great culture but in the abortion of a great vision.

  Henry Miller

  Lying, Men, Abortion

  4 Copy quote

• Civilization is drugs, alcohol, engines of war, prostitution, machines and machine slaves, low wages, bad food, bad taste, prisons, reformatories, lunatic asylums, divorce, perversion, brutal sports, suicides, infanticide, cinema, quackery, demagogy, strikes, lockouts, revolutions, putsches, colonization, electric chairs, guillotines, sabotage, floods, famine, disease, gangsters, money barons, horse racing, fashion shows, poodle dogs, chow dogs, Siamese cats, condoms, peccaries, syphilis, gonorrhea, insanity, neuroses, etc., etc.

  Henry Miller

  Sports, Suicide, Fashion

  Henry Miller (1961). “The Cosmological Eye”, p.177, New Directions Publishing

  14 Copy quote

• The vast difference between astrology and other sciences, if I may put it thus, is that astrology deals not with facts but with profundities. The solid ground on which the scientist pretends to rest gives way, in astrology, to imponderables.

  Henry Miller

  Differences, Astrology, Giving

  4 Copy quote

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