"Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such."

Miller, Henry on Acceptance
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"I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth."

Miller, Henry on Decay
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"It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd."

Miller, Henry on Democracy
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"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."

Miller, Henry on Destiny
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"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."

Miller, Henry on Disasters
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"The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal."

Miller, Henry on Dreams
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"The real enemy can always be met and conquered, or won over. Real antagonism is based on love, a love which has not recognized itself."

Miller, Henry on Enemies
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"What have we achieved in mowing down mountain ranges, harnessing the energy of mighty rivers, or moving whole populations about like chess pieces, if we ourselves remain the same restless, miserable, frustrated creatures we were before? To call such activity progress is utter delusion. We may succeed in altering the face of the earth until it is unrecognizable even to the Creator, but if we are unaffected wherein lies the meaning?"

Miller, Henry on Environmentalism
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"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."

Miller, Henry on Example
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"The world itself is pregnant with failure, is the perfect manifestation of imperfection, of the consciousness of failure."

Miller, Henry on Failure
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"Back of every creation, supporting it like an arch, is faith. Enthusiasm is nothing: it comes and goes. But if one believes, then miracles occur."

Miller, Henry on Faith
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"Fame is an illusive thing -- here today, gone tomorrow. The fickle, shallow mob raises its heroes to the pinnacle of approval today and hurls them into oblivion tomorrow at the slightest whim; cheers today, hisses tomorrow; utter forgetfulness in a few months."

Miller, Henry on Fame
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"There is nothing strange about fear: no matter in what guise it presents itself it is something with which we are all so familiar that when a man appears who is without it we are at once enslaved by him."

Miller, Henry on Fear
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"You can travel fifty thousand miles in America without once tasting a piece of good bread."

Miller, Henry on Food and Eating
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"Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed."

Miller, Henry on Force
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"The loss of sex polarity is part and parcel of the larger disintegration, the reflex of the soul's death, and coincident with the disappearance of great men, great deeds, great causes, great wars, etc."

Miller, Henry on Gender
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"If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms."

Miller, Henry on Ambition
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"Actually we are a vulgar, pushing mob whose passions are easily mobilized by demagogues, newspaper men, religious quacks, agitators and such like. To call this a society of free peoples is blasphemous. What have we to offer the world besides the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the maniacal delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment?"

Miller, Henry on America
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"Perhaps I am still very much of an American. That is to say, na?ve, optimistic, gullible. In the eyes of a European, what am I but an American to the core, an American who exposes his Americanism like a sore. Like it or not, I am a product of this land of plenty, a believer in superabundance, a believer in miracles."

Miller, Henry on America
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"I see America spreading disaster. I see America as a black curse upon the world. I see a long night settling in and that mushroom which has poisoned the world withering at the roots."

Miller, Henry on America
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"I have never been able to look upon America as young and vital but rather as prematurely old, as a fruit which rotted before it had a chance to ripen."

Miller, Henry on America
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"The world isn't kept running because it's a paying proposition. (God doesn't make a cent on the deal.) The world goes on because a few men in every generation believe in it utterly, accept it unquestioningly; they underwrite it with their lives."

Miller, Henry on Greatness
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"All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous, unpremeditated act without benefit of experience."

Miller, Henry on Growth
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"The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference."

Miller, Henry on Heroes and Heroism
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"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."

Miller, Henry on Hope
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