17 Henry Miller Quotes on Life

Henry Miller quotes on life

4. I am crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, for grander failures. I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want everyone to scratch himself to death.

6. All the men she's been with and now you, just you, and the barges going by, masts and hulls, the whole damned current of life flowing through you, through her, through all the guys behind you and after you, the flowers and the birds and the sun streaming in and the fragrance of it choking you, annihilating you.

8. Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.

15. Moralities, ethics, laws, customs, beliefs, doctrines - these are of trifling import. All that matters is that the miraculous become the norm.

18. A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in....

19. 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 out 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.

21. The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.

23. 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.

24. 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.

26. The frantic desire to Live, to live at any cost, is not a result of the life rhythm in us , but of the death rhythm.

30. 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.

39. Everything remains unsettled forever, depend on it.

42. Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain illusions. It's a sort of spiritual clap, I should say.

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

48. Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation- the other eight are unimportant.

55. To enter life by way of vagina is as good a way as any

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