Henry Miller Quotes

What do we any of us have but our illusions? And what do we ask of others but that we be allowed to keep them?

Some people have a difficult time facing truth and reality. They prefer to live in a make-believe world, pretending that certain things aren't happening.

I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

Pretending that we live doesn't make us alive.

The literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live. No good guys, no bad guys, just guys: that is, people bearing up in the crucible of their days and certainly not always - if ever - capable of articulating their condition.

I have always preferred the reflection of the life to life itself.

When we have ceased to love the stench of the human animal, either in others or in ourselves, then are we condemned to misery, and clear thinking can begin.

The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.

Credulity without enquiry is a sure way to deceive oneself.

Knowledge which ... transcends the bounds, the prejudices and pre-judgments of any one society and culture is not an illusion but, on the contrary, a glorious and luminous reality. Just how it was achieved remains subject to debate.

It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth …I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it.

The majority of men prefer delusion to truth. It soothes. It is easy to grasp. Above all, it fits more snugly than the truth into a universe of false appearances—of complex and irrational phenomena, defectively grasped.

We must face the facts as we find them, not as we may wish them.

It is not easy to distinguish reality from illusion, especially when one lives in a period of the great upheaval.

Facts make you face stuff about yourself you'd rather not see.

There are a mix of good and bad people everywhere, be it Punjab, Delhi or Haryana.

Characters, like people, don't need to be right - only understood and, perhaps, accepted. We are all grey, lighter and darker, depending on our state of security.

There is good and evil within all of us, and I enjoy searching to bring that out through my music. I like it that there are questions brought out by my music. People must look inside themselves for the answers

Any honest inquiry into the reality of nature also yields insights about ourselves.

Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.

If people can be educated to see the lowly side of their own natures, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and to love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more tolerance towards oneself can only have good results in respect for our neighbor; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures.

It is hard living down the tempers we are born with. We all begin well, for in our youth there is nothing we are more intolerant of than our own sins writ large in others and we fight them fiercely in ourselves; but we grow old and we see that these our sins are of all sins the really harmless ones to own, nay that they give a charm to any character, and so our struggle with them dies away.

Little mirrors were attached to the front of their cars, at which they glanced to see where they had been; then they stared ahead again. I had thought that only beetles had this delusion of Progress.

I like to hide behind my intellect. But the truth is, unless all of us start getting honest about what the reality is, things aren't going to change. If we all keep pretending that we know stuff and if everyone else would do what we knew and everything would be a better place, then nothing is going to change.