Miller, Henry (Henry Miller)

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.
-- Henry Miller

Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.
-- Henry Miller

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

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.
-- Henry Miller

More obscene than anything is inertia.
-- Henry Miller

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

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

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.
-- Henry Miller

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.
-- Henry Miller

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 our 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.
-- Henry Miller

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.
-- Henry Miller

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.
-- Henry Miller

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

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

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.
-- Henry Miller

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life.
-- Henry Miller

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.
-- Henry Miller

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

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.
-- Henry Miller

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

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

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

I am against revolutions becausee they always involve a return to the status quo.
-- Henry Miller

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

Everything remains unsettled forever, depend on it .
-- Henry Miller

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

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

Even if it doesn't work, there is something healthy and invigorating about direct action.
-- Henry Miller

I obey only my own instincts and intuition. I know nothing in advance. Often I put down things which I do not understand myself, secure in the in the knowledge that later they will become clear and meaningful to me. I have faith in the man who is writing, who is myself, the writer.

-- Henry Miller