Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Henry Miller (American Novelist)

Henry Valentine Miller (1891–1980) was an American novelist whose works achieved notoriety for their use of sexually explicit and obscene language. His two most famous novels, Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939,) were prohibited from publication and sale in the United States and Britain for many years.

Born and brought up in Brooklyn, New York City, Miller studied briefly at City College of New York and then held various jobs in New York. He devoted himself to writing in 1924 and, in 1930, moved to Paris, where he lived until 1940. There, he published Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, and Black Spring (1936.)

Upon returning to America, Miller completed a yearlong road trip across the United States and published a highly critical account of his impression of the U.S. during a time of chauvinism, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945.) He settled in Big Sur, California.

Many of Miller’s works are autobiographical. They were explicitly sexual, and he had to overcome many denunciations from censors. The American editions of the Tropics were not published until the early 1960s. The books were charged with obscenity and were the subject of 60 court cases. In 1964, the Supreme Court ruled in support of the books’ publication, ending censorship based on obscenity in America.

Miller’s other notable works were The Colossus of Maroussi (1941,) and The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy of novels: Sexus (1949,) Plexus (1953) and Nexus (1960.) The volumes of his correspondence include those with Lawrence Durrell (1963,) to Anaïs Nin (1965,) and with Wallace Fowlie (1975.)

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Henry Miller

In the beginning was the Word. Man acts it out. He is the act, not the actor.
Henry Miller
Topics: Creation

If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.
Henry Miller
Topics: Tourism, Attitude, Travel

I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul.
Henry Miller
Topics: Reading

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.
Henry Miller
Topics: Hope

No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.
Henry Miller
Topics: Destiny, Inspiration

The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary.
Henry Miller

What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.
Henry Miller
Topics: Humankind, Sex

Who hates the Jews more than the Jew?
Henry Miller
Topics: Jews, Religion, Judaism

Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil.
Henry Miller
Topics: Action, Example, Role models

All the lies and evasions by which man has nourished himself—civilization, in a word is the fruits of the creative artist. 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.
Henry Miller
Topics: Creativity

It’s silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are all brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars, hypocrites, poltroons.
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
Topics: Security, Change, Safety

Don’t look for miracles. You yourself are the miracle.
Henry Miller
Topics: Miracles

The prisoner is not the one who has committed a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over.
Henry Miller
Topics: Prison

A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold.
Henry Miller
Topics: Reading

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don’t take it too seriously.
Henry Miller
Topics: Music

The world itself is pregnant with failure, is the perfect manifestation of imperfection, of the consciousness of failure.
Henry Miller
Topics: Failure

There is something healthy and invigorating about direct action.
Henry Miller
Topics: Courage

Whenever a taboo is broken, something good happens, something vitalizing. Taboos after all are only hangovers, the product of diseased minds, you might say, of fearsome people who hadn’t the courage to live and who under the guise of morality and religion have imposed these things upon us.
Henry Miller
Topics: Superstition

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet—if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.
Henry Miller
Topics: Reading, Books, Literature

Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.
Henry Miller
Topics: Critics, Criticism

We create our fate every day we live.
Henry Miller
Topics: Fate

One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.
Henry Miller
Topics: Deception/Lying, Lies

We have two American flags always: one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it means danger, revolution, anarchy.
Henry Miller
Topics: Society

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.
Henry Miller
Topics: Dying, Death

In this age, which believes that there is a short cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is, in the long run, the easiest.
Henry Miller
Topics: Difficulty

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.
Henry Miller
Topics: Tragedy, Disasters

Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.
Henry Miller
Topics: Books

Actors die so loud.
Henry Miller
Topics: Actors, Acting

Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.
Henry Miller
Topics: Books, Literature, Reading

Wondering Whom to Read Next?

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *