Henry Miller Quotes: 25

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

• A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.

  The Books in My Life

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

  Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

• Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.

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

• Serenity is when you get above all this, when it doesn't matter what they think, say or want, but when you do as you are, and see God and Devil as one.

• What's a fuck when what I want is love?

• Everyone has his own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality there is.

  Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

• And for that one moment of freedom you have to listen to all that love crap... it drive me nuts sometimes... I want to kick them out immediately... I do now and then. But that doesn't keep them away. They like it, in fact. The less you notice them the more they chase after you. There's something perverse about women... they're all masochists at heart.

  Tropic of Cancer

• I have found God, but he is insufficient.

  Tropic of Cancer

• Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything godlike about God, it is that. He dared to imagine everything

  Sexus

• 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 the soul.

  Tropic of Cancer

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

  The Books in My Life

• It is with the soul that we grasp the essence of another human being, not with the mind, nor even with the heart.

• 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.

• Life's wildest moment---she kneels on the sidewalk. Everything else she does is lies, lies.

  Sexus

• Surely every one realizes, at some point along the way, that he is capable of living a far better life than the one he has chosen.

  Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

• One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar.

• The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.

• 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.

• Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race

• He saw that science had become as great a hoax as religion, that nationalism was a farce, patriotism a fraud, education a form of leprosy, and that morals were for cannibals

  The Time of the Assassins: a Study of Rimbaud

• Through endless night the earth whirls toward a creation unknown...

  Tropic of Cancer

• I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object.

  Tropic of Capricorn

• Ik kwam er achter dat ik er mijn hele leven heus niet naar had verlang om te leven - als wat anderen doen tenminste leven genoemd kan worden - maar wel om mezelf te kunnen uitdrukken.