Henry Miller quote: "It's good to be just plain happy, it's a little better to know that you're happy; but to understand that you're happy and to know why and how and still be happy, be happy in the being and the knowing, well that is beyond happiness, that is bliss."

I see America spreading disaster. I see America as a black curse upon the world. I see a long night ...
HENRY MILLER

We do not talk - we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of ne...
HENRY MILLER

One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.
HENRY MILLER

The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass it becomes a mysterious, aw...
HENRY MILLER

No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in whi...
HENRY MILLER

The world is the mirror of myself dying.
HENRY MILLER

In the attempt to defeat death man has been inevitably obliged to defeat life, for the two are inext...
HENRY MILLER

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

To walk in money through the night crowd, protected by money, lulled by money, dulled by money, the ...
HENRY MILLER

Sin, guilt, neurosis --they are one and the same, the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
HENRY MILLER

Who hates the Jews more than the Jew?
HENRY MILLER

Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to ...
HENRY MILLER

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It o...
HENRY MILLER

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can ...
HENRY MILLER

A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and ...
HENRY MILLER

I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page...
HENRY MILLER

No matter how vast, how total, the failure of man here on earth, the work of man will be resumed els...
HENRY MILLER

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

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we wo...
HENRY MILLER

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in t...
HENRY MILLER

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He i...
HENRY MILLER

I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I ...
HENRY MILLER

Every genuine boy is a rebel and an anarch. If he were allowed to develop according to his own insti...
HENRY MILLER

Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.
HENRY MILLER

What distinguishes the majority of men from the few is their inability to act according to their bel...
HENRY MILLER

I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous [person], the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restles...
HENRY MILLER

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

Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed.
HENRY MILLER

I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and t...
HENRY MILLER

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circul...
HENRY MILLER

The loss of sex polarity is part and parcel of the larger disintegration, the reflex of the soul's d...
HENRY MILLER

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.
HENRY MILLER

We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the stree...
HENRY MILLER

The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.
HENRY MILLER

Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music -- the world is so rich...
HENRY MILLER

And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other w...
HENRY MILLER

When you know what men are capable of you marvel neither at their sublimity nor their baseness. Ther...
HENRY MILLER

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

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

I will never again go to people under false pretenses even if it is to give them the Holy Bible. I w...
HENRY MILLER

No one asks you to throw Mozart out of the window. Keep Mozart. Cherish him. Keep Moses too, and Bud...
HENRY MILLER

Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which...
HENRY MILLER

Actually we are a vulgar, pushing mob whose passions are easily mobilized by demagogues, newspaper m...
HENRY MILLER

Perhaps I am still very much of an American. That is to say, na?ve, optimistic, gullible. In the eye...
HENRY MILLER

I have never been able to look upon America as young and vital but rather as prematurely old, as a f...
HENRY MILLER

The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. In this world the poet is a...
HENRY MILLER

Actors die so loud.
HENRY MILLER

One's destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.
HENRY MILLER

Instead of asking -- How much damage will the work in question bring about? why not ask -- How much ...
HENRY MILLER

The life of a creator is not the only life nor perhaps the most interesting which a man leads. There...
HENRY MILLER

What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.
HENRY MILLER

Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.
HENRY MILLER

The word civilization to my mind is coupled with death. When I use the word, I see civilization as a...
HENRY MILLER

Civilization is drugs, alcohol, engines of war, prostitution, machines and machine slaves, low wages...
HENRY MILLER

The city is loveliest when the sweet death racket begins. Her own life lived in defiance of nature, ...
HENRY MILLER

The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself. All that you despise, all that you loathe, ...
HENRY MILLER

All the lies and evasions by which man has nourished himself -- civilization, in a word is the fruit...
HENRY MILLER

There is the happiness which comes from creative effort. The joy of dreaming, creating, building, wh...
HENRY MILLER

We do not talk -- we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of n...
HENRY MILLER

Why are we so full of restraint? Why do we not give in all directions? Is it fear of losing ourselve...
HENRY MILLER

Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to i...
HENRY MILLER

If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms.
HENRY MILLER

The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with t...
HENRY MILLER

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

In this age, which believes that there is a short cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learn...
HENRY MILLER

It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything u...
HENRY MILLER

Men are not suffering from the lack of good literature, good art, good theatre, good music, but from...
HENRY MILLER

We have been educated to such a fine -- or dull -- point that we are incapable of enjoying something...
HENRY MILLER

Fame is an illusive thing -- here today, gone tomorrow. The fickle, shallow mob raises its heroes to...
HENRY MILLER

Back of every creation, supporting it like an arch, is faith. Enthusiasm is nothing: it comes and go...
HENRY MILLER

The world itself is pregnant with failure, is the perfect manifestation of imperfection, of the cons...
HENRY MILLER

The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference.
HENRY MILLER

All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous, unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.
HENRY MILLER

The world isn't kept running because it's a paying proposition. (God doesn't make a cent on the deal...
HENRY MILLER

Man has demonstrated that he is master of everything -- except his own nature.
HENRY MILLER

The man who is forever disturbed about the condition of humanity either has no problems of his own o...
HENRY MILLER

Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dea...
HENRY MILLER

History is the myth, the true myth, of man's fall made manifest in time.
HENRY MILLER

When one is trying to do something beyond his known powers it is useless to seek the approval of fri...
HENRY MILLER

There is nothing strange about fear: no matter in what guise it presents itself it is something with...
HENRY MILLER

Every man has his own destiny: the only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it...
HENRY MILLER

The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is...
HENRY MILLER

Remorse is impotence, it will sin again. Only repentance is strong, it can end everything.
HENRY MILLER

You can travel fifty thousand miles in America without once tasting a piece of good bread.
HENRY MILLER

There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.
HENRY MILLER

Whenever a taboo is broken, something good happens, something vitalizing. Taboos after all are only ...
HENRY MILLER

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

The prisoner is not the one who has committed a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives...
HENRY MILLER

It's silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are all brothers. The truth is more likely tha...
HENRY MILLER

Man torturing man is a fiend beyond description. You turn a corner in the dark and there he is. You ...
HENRY MILLER

Moralities, ethics, laws, customs, beliefs, doctrines --these are of trifling import. All that matte...
HENRY MILLER

Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to prof...
HENRY MILLER

The word which gives the key to the national vice is waste. And people who are wasteful are not wise...
HENRY MILLER

Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it make...
HENRY MILLER

Broadway, such as I see it now and have seen it for twenty-five years, is a ramp that was conceived ...
HENRY MILLER

The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author hims...
HENRY MILLER

To live without killing is a thought which could electrify the world, if men were only capable of st...
HENRY MILLER

It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to sp...
HENRY MILLER

Topographically the country is magnificent -- and terrifying. Why terrifying? Because nowhere else i...
HENRY MILLER

If you are well off and can afford to spend ten or twenty-five dollars a day to hire some patient so...
HENRY MILLER

Analysis brings no curative powers in its train; it merely makes us conscious of the existence of an...
HENRY MILLER

Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.
HENRY MILLER

I didn't have to think up so much as a comma or a semicolon; it was all given, straight from the cel...
HENRY MILLER

In the beginning was the Word. Man acts it out. He is the act, not the actor.
HENRY MILLER

What have we achieved in mowing down mountain ranges, harnessing the energy of mighty rivers, or mov...
HENRY MILLER

Reality is not protected or defended by laws, proclamations, ukases, cannons and armadas. Reality is...
HENRY MILLER

Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring, through obeyi...
HENRY MILLER

The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in orde...
HENRY MILLER

Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.
HENRY MILLER

What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.
HENRY MILLER

Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation. The other eight are unimportant.
HENRY MILLER

Every man has his own destiny: the only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it...
HENRY MILLER

The world is not to be put in order, the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in...
HENRY MILLER

The only thing we never get enough of is love; and the only thing we never give enough of is love.
HENRY MILLER

I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.
HENRY MILLER

The imaginary friends I had as a kid dropped me because their friends thought I didn't exist.
HENRY MILLER

In this age, which believes that there is a short cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learn...
HENRY MILLER

It isn't the oceans which cut us off from the world -- it's the American way of looking at things.
HENRY MILLER

The world is not to be put in order, the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in ...
HENRY MILLER

We live at the edge of the miraculous.
HENRY MILLER

Every genuine boy is a rebel and an anarch. If he were allowed to develop according to his own inst...
HENRY MILLER

It isn't the oceans which cut us off from the world -- it's the American way of looking at things.
HENRY MILLER

When one is trying to do something beyond his known powers it is useless to seek the approval of fr...
HENRY MILLER

Security is an illusion. Life is either a daring adventure or it is nothing at all.
HENRY MILLER

Dedication is not what others expect of you, it is what you can give to others.
HENRY MILLER

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we wo...
HENRY MILLER

We create our fate every day we live
HENRY MILLER

Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not yet understood
HENRY MILLER

Certainly paradise, whatever, wherever it be, contains flaws. (Paradisical flaws, if you like.) If i...
HENRY MILLER

A new world is not made simply by trying to forget the old. A new world is made with a new spirit, w...
HENRY MILLER

The American white man (not to speak of the Indian, the Negro, the Mexican) hasn't a ghost of a chan...
HENRY MILLER

An artist is always alone -- if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.
HENRY MILLER

Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack.
HENRY MILLER

Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich,...
HENRY MILLER

One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction ...
HENRY MILLER

It isn't the oceans which cut us off from the world - it's the American way of looking at th...
HENRY MILLER

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

The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough is love.
HENRY MILLER

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.
HENRY MILLER

Let me be, was all I wanted. Be what I am, no matter how I am.
HENRY MILLER

If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One's d...
HENRY MILLER

The legal system is often a mystery, and we, its priests, preside over rituals baffling to everyday ...
HENRY MILLER

One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sa...
HENRY MILLER

The real enemy can always be met and conquered, or won over. Real antagonism is based on love, a lov...
HENRY MILLER

We have two American flags always: one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it means...
HENRY MILLER

To have her here in bed with me, breathing on me, her hair in my mouth—I count that something of a...
HENRY MILLER

The world is not to be put in order. The world is order. It is for us to put ourselves in unison wit...
HENRY MILLER

True strength lies in submission which permits one to dedicate his life, through devotion, to someth...
HENRY MILLER

Moralities, ethics, laws, customs, beliefs, doctrines - these are of trifling import. All that matte...
HENRY MILLER

What distinguishes the majority of men from the few is their ability to act according to their belie...
HENRY MILLER

The world dies over and over again, but the skeleton always gets up and walks.
HENRY MILLER

The tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on my face. Thousands and thousands of...
HENRY MILLER

Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to enduring fact of mys...
HENRY MILLER

Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestionin...
HENRY MILLER

If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One's desti...
HENRY MILLER

The stabbing horror of life is not contained in calamities and disasters, because these things wake ...
HENRY MILLER

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the o...
HENRY MILLER

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.
HENRY MILLER

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. ...
HENRY MILLER

What does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it?
HENRY MILLER

One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.
HENRY MILLER

Living apart and at peace with myself, I came to realize more vividly the meaning of the doctrine of...
HENRY MILLER

Life is constantly providing us with new funds, new resources, even when we are reduced to immobilit...
HENRY MILLER

Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.
HENRY MILLER

All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without the benefit of experience...
HENRY MILLER

The American ideal is youth --handsome, empty youth.
HENRY MILLER

We have been educated to such a fine / or dull / point that we are incapable of enjoying something n...
HENRY MILLER

The tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on my face. Thousands and thousands of...
HENRY MILLER

Life is 440 horsepower in a 2-cylinder engine.
HENRY MILLER

It is preposterous and unreasonable.
HENRY MILLER

We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the stree...
HENRY MILLER

Los Angeles gives one the feeling of the future more strongly than any city I know of. A bad future,...
HENRY MILLER

In expanding the field of knowledge we but increase the horizon of ignorance.
HENRY MILLER

1) Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2) Start no more new books, add no more new mate...
HENRY MILLER

Even if I could write the book I want to write nobody would take it - I know my compatriots only too...
HENRY MILLER

Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so r...
HENRY MILLER

The concert is a polite form of self induced torture.
HENRY MILLER

[...] I know how to inflame a cunt. I shoot hot bolts into you, Tania. I make your ovaries incandesc...
HENRY MILLER

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we wo...
HENRY MILLER

Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines ...
HENRY MILLER

Everybody says sex is obscene. The only true obscenity is war.
HENRY MILLER

I have found God, but he is insufficient.
HENRY MILLER

If I am against the condition of the world it is not because I am a moralist, it is because I want t...
HENRY MILLER

I am thinking of one woman and the rest is blotto. I say I am thinking of her, but the truth is I am...
HENRY MILLER

Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I see now that it was mean...
HENRY MILLER

Giving and receiving are at bottom one thing, dependent on whether one lives open or closed. Living ...
HENRY MILLER

In the days to come, when it will seem as if I were entombed, when the very firmament threatens to c...
HENRY MILLER

I wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost of annihilation. I wanted to...
HENRY MILLER

You make me tremendously happy to hold me undivided - to let me be the artist, as it were, and yet n...
HENRY MILLER

الكتابة بخط اليد على الجدار ليست غامضة ولا مهددة لمن يس...
HENRY MILLER

el mundo nunca deja morir de hambre a una mujer guapa.
HENRY MILLER

Es extraño. Había llegado a resignarme tanto a aquella vida sin ella y, sin embargo, si pensaba en...
HENRY MILLER

Hay algo perverso en las mujeres... en el fondo son todas masoquistas.
HENRY MILLER

There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy
HENRY MILLER

We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate.
HENRY MILLER

I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, ...
HENRY MILLER

Sin, guilt, neurosis /they are one and the same, the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
HENRY MILLER

The real leader has no need to lead he is content to point the way
HENRY MILLER

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

One of the reasons why so few of us ever act, instead of react, is because we are continually stifli...
HENRY MILLER

It's good to be just plain happy, it's a little better to know that you're happy; but to understand that you're happy and to know why and how and still be happy, be happy in the being and the knowing, well that is beyond happiness, that is bliss.

Copied!

Henry Miller

It's good to be just plain happy, it's a little better to know that you're happy; but to understand that you're happy and to know why and how and still be happy, be happy in the being and the knowing, well that is beyond happiness, that is bliss.

Henry Miller

Share:

Related

More Henry Miller