Quotes by Miller, Henry

"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 dream
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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 environment
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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   

"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   

"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   

"Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed."

Miller, Henry on force   

"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   

"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   

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

Miller, Henry on nature   

"The man who is forever disturbed about the condition of humanity either has no problems of his own or has refused to face them."

Miller, Henry on humankind   

"Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything."

Miller, Henry on imagination   

"No one asks you to throw Mozart out of the window. Keep Mozart. Cherish him. Keep Moses too, and Buddha and Lao Tzu and Christ. Keep them in your heart. But make room for the others, the coming ones, the ones who are already scratching on the window-panes."

Miller, Henry on innovation
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"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."

Miller, Henry on insecurity
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"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!"

Miller, Henry on inspiration   

"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."

Miller, Henry on integrity   

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

Miller, Henry on isolation   

"Who hates the Jews more than the Jew?"

Miller, Henry on judaism and jews   

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

Miller, Henry on knowledge
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"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."

Miller, Henry on land   

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

Miller, Henry on leadership
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"It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir."

Miller, Henry on letters   

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

Miller, Henry on lies and lying
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"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."

Miller, Henry on life
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