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I read to be taken out of myself, to become ecstatic.

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
Taken
Read
Become
Ecstatic

More quotes by Henry Miller

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Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middle-class men and woman who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will least forever or else are so frightened it won't, that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.
Henry Miller
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I'd rather sit down and write a letter than call someone up. I hate the telephone.
Henry Miller
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Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.
Henry Miller
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Next to love friendship, in my opinion, is the most valuable thing life has to offer.
Henry Miller
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The man who is intoxicated with life does not pass judgment, does not seek to come to a conclusion, does not impose his message on the world.
Henry Miller
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The man who is forever disturbed about the condition of humanity either has no problems of his own or has refused to face them.
Henry Miller
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To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.
Henry Miller
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Every day that we fail to live out the maximum of our potentialities we kill the Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, Christ which is in us.
Henry Miller
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Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. What the general reader or the critic makes of them is not my concern.
Henry Miller
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To imagine a new world is to live it daily, each thought, each glance, each step, each gesture, killing and recreating, death always a step in advance. To spit on the past is not enough. To proclaim the future is not enough. One must act as if the past were dead and the future unrealizable.
Henry Miller
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I have made a silent compact with myself not to change a line of what I write. I am not interested in perfecting my thoughts, nor my actions.
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.
Henry Miller
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Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring.
Henry Miller
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Until he [man] has become fully human, until he learns to conduct himself as a member of the earth, he will continue to create gods who will destroy him. The tragedy of Greece lies not in the destruction of a great culture but in the abortion of a great vision.
Henry Miller
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Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.
Henry Miller
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Music is the can-opener of the soul.
Henry Miller
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A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation. Lend and borrow to the maximum.
Henry Miller
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When you can't create you can work
Henry Miller
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Whenever a taboo is broken, something good happens, something vitalizing. Taboos after all are only hangovers, the product of diseased minds, you might say, of fearsome people who hadn't the courage to live and who under the guise of morality and religion have imposed these things upon us.
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