Henry Miller Quotes

The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely-human creature. (Referenced in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young)

I don't have a saviour or a royal family.

The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.

The world is vast, beautiful, and fascinating, even awe-inspiring - but impersonal. It demands nothing of me, and allows me to demand nothing of it.

Thou shalt free thyself from convention, from everyday morality.

Collectivism can be imposed only upon slaves—and then collectivism becomes the negation of humanity.

I felt free once I realized I was never going to fit the narrow mold society wanted me to fit in.

To really belong, we have got, first, to get it clear with ourselves that we do not belong and do not want to belong to an unfree world. As free men and women we have got to reject much of it and to know why we are rejecting it.

We are now enjoying the liberation that comes with not having to be organization men and women, and that's fabulous. But there are new social consequences here of which we need to be aware, and the sale of the self and what that entails for the rest of our lives is quite sobering.

You need not think that because we chanced to be born of the same parents, I shall suffer you to fasten me down by even the feeblest claim: I can tell you this - if the whole human race, ourselves excepted, were swept away, and we two stood alone on the earth, I would leave you in the old world, and betake myself to new.

[Zarathustra] never abandoned the watchword of not having any end, not serving a cause, because, as he knew, causes pluck off the wings we fly with.

... he preferred his own madness, to the regular sanity. He rejoiced in his own madness, he was free. He did not want that old sanity of the world, which was become so repulsive. He rejoiced in the new-found world of his madness. It was so fresh and delicate and so satisfying.

. . . the man is free, we say, who exists for his own sake and not for another's.

I am a man who perceives life in a certain way, a man who rejects things that defecate on humankind, who rejects anything that will not give people room for dissent.

The individual man tries to escape the race. And as soon as he ceases to represent the race, he represents man.

Her own contempt for any forms of pressure society might put on her was so profound and instinctive that she as instinctively despised anyone who paid tribute to them.

Long live freedom and damn the ideologies.

I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free.

I don't need nobody tryin' to make me over -- I just wanna live simple and free.

Try to be free: you will die of hunger.

Look at nature, work independently, and solve your own problems.

In order to exist, man must rebel.

I've been labelled many times - a criminal, an anarchist, a rebel, sometimes human garbage, but never a philosopher, which is a pity because that's what I am. I chose a life apart from the common flow, not only because the common flow makes me sick but because I question the logic of the flow, and not only that - I don't know if the flow exists! Why should I chain myself to the wheel when the wheel itself might be a construct, an invention, a common dream to enslave us?

We have dared to be free. Let us dare to be so by ourselves and for ourselves.

As long as people are going to call you lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention.