Henry Miller Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. Anaïs, I don't know how to tell you what I feel. I live in perpetual expectancy. You come and the time slips away in a dream. It is only when you go that I realize completely your presence. And then it is too late. You numb me. [...] This is a little drunken, Anaïs. I am saying to myself "here is the first woman with whom I can be absolutely sincere." I remember your saying - "you could fool me, I wouldn't know it." When I walk along the boulevards and think of that. I can't fool you - and yet I would like to. I mean that I can never be absolutely loyal - it's not in me. I love women, or life, too much - which it is, I don't know. But laugh, Anaïs, I love to hear you laugh. You are the only woman who has a sense of gaiety, a wise tolerance - no more, you seem to urge me to betray you. I love you for that. [...]I don't know what to expect of you, but it is something in the way of a miracle. I am going to demand everything of you - even the impossible, because you encourage it. You are really strong. I even like your deceit, your treachery. It seems aristocratic to me. A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin 1932-1953

2. Surely every one realizes, at some point along the way, that he is capable of living a far better life than the one he has chosen. Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

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

4. ...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. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured- disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui- in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off. Tropic of Cancer

5. And for that one moment of freedom you have to listen to all that love crap... it drive me nuts sometimes... I want to kick them out immediately... I do now and then. But that doesn't keep them away. They like it, in fact. The less you notice them the more they chase after you. There's something perverse about women... they're all masochists at heart. Tropic of Cancer

6. He saw that science had become as great a hoax as religion, that nationalism was a farce, patriotism a fraud, education a form of leprosy, and that morals were for cannibals The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Arthur Rimbaud

7. I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object. Tropic of Capricorn

8. Ik kwam er achter dat ik er mijn hele leven heus niet naar had verlang om te leven - als wat anderen doen tenminste leven genoemd kan worden - maar wel om mezelf te kunnen uitdrukken.

9. It is with the soul that we grasp the essence of another human being, not with the mind, nor even with the heart.

10. Serenity is when you get above all this, when it doesn't matter what they think, say or want, but when you do as you are, and see God and Devil as one.

11. There was nothing I wished to do which I could just as well not do. Tropic of Capricorn

12. Through endless night the earth whirls toward a creation unknown... Tropic of Cancer

13. To taste it once is to taste it forever --- life or death. Whichever way the coin flips is right, so long as you hold no stakes. Tropic of Capricorn