891 Quotes by Henry Miller

Who but the artist has the power to open man up, to set free the imagination? The others - priest, teacher, saint, statesman, warrior - hold us to the path of history. They keep us chained to the rock, that the vultures may eat out our hearts. It is the artist who has the courage to go against the crowd; he is the unrecognized "hero of our time" - and of all time.

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

I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a chance to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard - and in order to forget.

I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous [person], the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the [person] in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable.

Whoever uses the spirit that is in him creatively is an artist.To make living itself an art, that is the goal.

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.

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

If we are always arriving and departing, it is alsotrue that we are eternally anchored. One's destinationis never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.

These latter sums, running up into three figures, he no longer regarded as debts. A debt was an obligation one intended to meet someday.