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Every man has his own destiny: the only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it leads him.

Henry Miller

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Henry Miller
Age: 88 †
Born: 1891
Born: December 26
Died: 1980
Died: June 7
Essayist
Novelist
Painter
Writer
New York City
New York
Genri Miller
Henri Miller
Phineas Flapdoodle
Destiny
Accept
Imperative
Follow
Imperatives
Accepting
Leads
Matter
Acceptance
Every
Integrity
Men
Commitment
Fate

More quotes by Henry Miller

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The life of a creator is not the only life nor perhaps the most interesting which a man leads. There is a time for play and a time for work, a time for creation and a time for lying fallow. 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.
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Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
Henry Miller
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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.
Henry Miller
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What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.
Henry Miller
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I think someday you're going to be a great writer, he said. But he added maliciously, first you'll have to suffer a bit. I mean really suffer, because you don't know what the word means yet. You only think you've suffered. You've got to fall in love first.
Henry Miller
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What I want is to open up. I want to know what's inside me. I want everybody to open up. I'm like an imbecile with a can opener in his hand, wondering where to begin-- to open up the earth. I know that underneath the mess everything is marvelous. I'm sure of it.
Henry Miller
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The monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses.
Henry Miller
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A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.
Henry Miller
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The purpose of life is to remember.
Henry Miller
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The enchanting, and sometimes terrifying, thing is that the world can be so many things to so many different souls. That it can be, and is, all these things at once and the same time.
Henry Miller
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The real enemy can always be met and conquered, or won over. Real antagonism is based on love, a love which has not recognized itself.
Henry Miller
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I had no more need of God than He had of me, and if there were one, I often said to myself, I would meet Him calmly and spit in His face.
Henry Miller
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Hitler is no worse, nay better, in my opinion, than the other lugs. He makes the German mistake of being tactless, that's all.
Henry Miller
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I demanded a realm in which I should be both master and slave at the same time: The world of art is the only such realm.
Henry Miller
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As long as that spark of passion is missing there is no human significance in the performance.
Henry Miller
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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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When spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise.
Henry Miller
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I like the one about the little soulworms that fly out of the nest for the resurrection.
Henry Miller
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I struggled in the beginning. I said I was going to write the truth, so help me God. And I thought I was. I found I couldn't. Nobody can write the absolute truth.
Henry Miller
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By choosing to live above the ordinary level we create extraordinary problems for ourselves.
Henry Miller