"We must be holy without holiness. We must be whole, complete. That's being holy. Any other kind of holiness is false, a snare, and a delusion."
Read quote
3 likes
Quote collection
Henry Miller quotes (page 20 of 23)
441 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Reality is not protected or defended by laws, proclamations, ukases, cannons and armadas. Reality is that which is sprouting all the time out of death and disintegration."
Read quote
3 likes
"It was here in Big Sur that I first learned to say 'amen.'"
Read quote
3 likes
"The essential thing is to WANT to sing. This then is a song. I am singing."
Read quote
3 likes
"Better to separate than never to marry."
Read quote
3 likes
"The poem is the dream made flesh, in a two-fold sense: as work of art, and as life, which is a work of art."
Read quote
3 likes
"The piano bar is the gateway to the halls of masturbation."
Read quote
3 likes
"I had to learn to think, feel, and see in a totally new fashion, in an uneducated way, in my own way, which is the hardest thing in the world. I had to throw myself into the current, knowing that I would probably sink."
Read quote
3 likes
"Each man has his own way of being himself and of saying it so ultimately that he can't be denied."
Read quote
3 likes
"Things happen or they don't happen, that's all. Nothing is accomplished by sweat and struggle. Nearly everything which we call life is just insomnia, an agony because we've lost the habit of falling asleep. We don't know how to let go. We're like a Jack-in-the-box perched on top of a spring and the more we struggle the harder it is to get back in the box."
Read quote
3 likes
"Paint what you like and die happy"
Read quote
3 likes
"The city grows like a cancer; I must grow like a sun. The city eats deeper and deeper into the red; it is an insatiable white louse which must die eventually of inanition. I am going to starve the white louse which is eating me up. I am going to die as a city in order to become again a man. Therefore I close my ears, my eyes, my mouth."
Read quote
3 likes
"Human beings make a strange fauna and flora. From a distance they appear negligible; close up they are apt to appear ugly and malicious. More than anything they need to be surrounded with sufficient space―space even more than time."
Read quote
3 likes
"The moment one is on the side of life; peace and security drop out of consciousness. The only peace, the only security, is in fulfillment."
Read quote
3 likes
"I'm delirious because I'm dying so fast."
Read quote
3 likes
"But you can’t put fight into a man’s guts if he hasn’t any fight in him. There are some of us so cowardly that you can’t ever make heroes of us, not even if you frighten us to death. We know too much, maybe. There are some of us who don’t live in the moment, who live a little ahead, or a little behind."
Read quote
3 likes
"I will never again go to people under false pretenses even if it is to give them the Holy Bible. I will never again sell anything, even if I have to starve. I am going home now and I will sit down and really write about people."
Read quote
3 likes
"I didn't have to think up so much as a comma or a semicolon; it was all given, straight from the celestial recording room. Weary, I would beg for a break, an intermission, time enough, let's say, to go to the toilet or take a breath of fresh air on the balcony. Nothing doing!"
Read quote
3 likes
"A world without hope, but no despair"
Read quote
3 likes
"I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a chance to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard - and in order to forget."
Read quote
3 likes