Henry Miller

Voyages are accomplished inwardly.

And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words?

The world dies over and over again, but the skeleton always gets up and walks.

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.

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

Tomorrow you may bring about the destruction of your world. Tomorrow you may sing in Paradise above the smoking ruins of your world-cities. But tonight I would like to think of one man, a lone individual, a man without name or country, a man whom I respect because he has absolutely nothing in common with you - MYSELF. Tonight I shall meditate upon that which I am.

An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.

When I realize that she is gone, perhaps gone forever, a great void opens up and I feel that I am falling, falling, falling into deep, black space. And this is worse than tears, deeper than regret or pain or sorrow, it is the abyss into which Satan was plunged. There is no climbing back, no ray of light, no sound of human voice or human touch of hand.

Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.

In this age, which believes that there is a short cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is, in the long run, the easiest.

Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.

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.

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.

What I really hoped for, no doubt, was to come upon one of those lives which begin nowhere, which lead us through marshes and salt flats, trickling away, seemingly without plan, purpose or goal, and suddenly emerge, gushing like geysers, and never cease gushing, even in death.

Who wants to be a hundred? What's the point of it? A short life and a merry one is far better than a long one sustained by fear, caution, and perpetual medical surveillance.

They were painfully clean. But inwardly they stank. Never once had they opened the door which leads to the soul; never once did they dream of taking a blind leap into the dark.

And there is a time, glorious too in its own way, when one scarcely exists, when one is a complete void. I mean, when boredom seems the very stuff of life.

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

Until we accept the fact that life itself is founded in mystery, we shall learn nothing.