Henry Miller

“Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed.”

“The prisoner is not the one who has commited a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over.”

“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.”

“The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order.”

“Every time you come to the limit of what is demanded of you, you are faced with the same problem-to be yourself!”

“It was a crushing defeat, but it put iron in my backbone and sulphur in my blood. I knew at least what it was to fail. I knew what it was to attempt something big.”

“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.”

“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.”

“If there is to be any peace it will come through being, not having.”

“The only thing we never get enough of is love; and the only thing we never give enough of is love.”

“Through endless night the earth whirls toward a creation unknown...”

“literature coming from the cold corpse of a whore is the last thing to be served in bed.”

“Up on the Brooklyn Bridge a man is standing in agony, waiting to jump, or waiting to write a poem, or waiting for the blood to leave his vessels because if he advances another foot the pain of his love will kill him.”

“The concert is a polite form of self induced torture.”

“Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.”

“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.”

“We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets - we remember only.”

“The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.”

“Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement.”

“I have found God, but he is insufficient.”