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Mankind, Man
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Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.
-Henry Miller
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Men & Women
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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.
-Henry Miller
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Mind, the
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We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets -- we remember only.
-Henry Miller
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The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.
-Henry Miller
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Miracles
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Moralities, ethics, laws, customs, beliefs, doctrines --these are of trifling import. All that matters is that the miraculous become the norm.
-Henry Miller
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Money
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To walk in money through the night crowd, protected by money, lulled by money, dulled by money, the crowd itself a money, the breath money, no least single object anywhere that is not money. Money, money everywhere and still not enough! And then no money, or a little money, or less money, or more money but money always money . and if you have money , or you don't have money, it is the money that counts, and money makes money, but what makes money make money?
-Henry Miller
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Murder
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To live without killing is a thought which could electrify the world, if men were only capable of staying awake long enough to let the idea soak in.
-Henry Miller, The Henry Miller Reader (1959), Reunion in Brooklyn
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Music
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Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.
-Henry Miller
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Obscurity
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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
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Passion
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Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music -- the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.
-Henry Miller
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Perception
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The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.
-Henry Miller
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Philosophy
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Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.
-Henry Miller
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Politics
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One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.
-Henry Miller
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Potential
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And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words?
-Henry Miller
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When you know what men are capable of you marvel neither at their sublimity nor their baseness. There are no limits in either direction apparently.
-Henry Miller
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Power
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Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed.
-Henry Miller
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Pretending
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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, Op-Ed page, N.Y. Times, September 7, 1974
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Prison
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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
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Procrastination
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Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement.
-Henry Miller
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Profanity, Swearing, Vulgarity
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Obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk.
-Henry Miller
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Progress
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Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring, through obeying the blind urge.
-Henry Miller
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Prophecy
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Nine-tenths of our sickness can be prevented by right thinking plus right hygiene -- nine-tenths of it!
-Henry Miller
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There are lone figures armed only with ideas, sometimes with just one idea, who blast away whole epochs in which we are enwrapped like mummies. Some are powerful enough to resurrect the dead. Some steal on us unawares and put a spell over us which it takes centuries to throw off. Some put a curse on us, for our stupidity and inertia, and then it seems as if God himself were unable to lift it.
-Henry Miller
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Psychiatry
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If you are well off and can afford to spend ten or twenty-five dollars a day to hire some patient soul to listen to your troubles you can be readjusted to the crazy scheme of things and spare yourself the humiliation of becoming a Christian Scientist. You can have your ego trimmed or removed, as you wish, just like a wart or bunion.
-Henry Miller
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Analysis brings no curative powers in its train; it merely makes us conscious of the existence of an evil, which, oddly enough, is consciousness.
-Henry Miller
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Books by and about Henry Miller