Henry Miller Quotes on Life (22 Quotes)


    Great God! What have I turned into? What right have you people to clutter up my life, steal my time, probe my soul, suckle my thoughts, have me for your companion, confidant, and information bureau? What do you take me for? Am I an entertainer on salary, required every evening to play an intellectual farce under your stupid noses? Am I a slave, bought and paid for, to crawl on my belly in front of you idlers and lay at your feet all that I do and all that I know?

    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.

    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.

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

    A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there that of the pulse, the heart beat.


    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.

    Life is 440 horsepower in a 2-cylinder engine.

    The stabbing horror of life is not contained in calamities and disasters, because these things wake one up and one gets very familiar and intimate with them and finally they become tame again. No, it is more like being in a hotel room in Hoboken let us say, and just enough money in one's pocket for another meal.

    Life is constantly providing us with new funds, new resources, even when we are reduced to immobility. In life's ledger there is no such thing as frozen assets.

    The life of a creator is not the only life nor perhaps the most interesting which a man leads. There is a time for play and a time for work, a time for creation and a time for lying fallow. And there is a time, glorious too in its own way, when one scarcely exists, when one is a complete void. I mean when boredom seems the very stuff of life.

    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.

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

    Plots and character don't make life. Life is here and now, anytime you say the word, anytime you let her rip.

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

    Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement.

    Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring.

    I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.

    One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.

    Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.

    True strength lies in submission which permits one to dedicate his life, through devotion, to something beyond himself.

    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 (by writing) 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.

    In the attempt to defeat death man has been inevitably obliged to defeat life, for the two are inextricably related. Life moves on to death, and to deny one is to deny the other.


    More Henry Miller Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Man - Life - World - Art - Faces - Time - Death & Dying - Literature - America - Money & Wealth - Mind - Beauty - War & Peace - God - Imagination & Visualization - Sense & Perception - Mystery - Nature - Society & Civilization - View All Henry Miller Quotations

    More Henry Miller Quotations (By Book Titles)


    - Tropic of Cancer

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