Henry Miller Quotes

Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

The moment you praise a book too highly you waken a resistance in your listener.

The word ‘civilization’ to my mind is coupled with death. When I use the word, I see civilization as a crippling, thwarting thing, a stultifying thing… Civilization is the arteriosclerosis of culture.

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

We resist only what is inevitable.

History is the myth, the true myth, of man’s fall made manifest in time

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.

It is the creative nature of man which has refused to let him lapse back into that unconscious unity with life which characterizes the animal world from which he made his escape.

The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself. All that you despise, all that you loathe, all that you reject, all that you condemn and seek to convert by punishment springs from you.

The world goes on because a few men in every generation believe in it utterly, accept it unquestioningly, underwrite it with their lives.

Nowhere have I encountered such a dull, monotonous fabric of life as here in America. Here boredom reaches its peak.

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

The great joy of the artist is to become aware of a higher order of things, to recognize by the compulsive and spontaneous manipulation of his own impulses the resemblance between human creation and what is called ‘divine’ creation.

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.

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

Though I’ve never read a line of Homer I believe the Greek of today is essentially unchanged. If anything he is more Greek than he ever was.

All that matters is that the miraculous becomes the norm.