Henry Miller Quotes

rules exist for a reason. Rules exist because when people don't follow them, people get hurt.

People have a right to be shocked; the mention of unmentionable things is a kind of participation in them.

Obviously, there are people who constrict themselves and build walls around themselves, whether it's from a moral standpoint or a patriotic standpoint, or just plain old conformity, and who therefore live in those little prisons, and when things breach those walls, it's shocking for them.

Most people believe you have to have some moral absolutes if you want to hold back chaos.

By putting these sort of lines around what ideas are proper or improper, we lose things.

Do you know what morals are? Morals are an obedience to rules that people laid down to help you live among them.

Life is livable because we know that wherever we go most of the people we meet will be restrained in their actions towards us by an almost instinctive network of taboos.

Neither the Church nor modern public opinion condemns petting, provided it stops short at a certain point.

In reality, moral rules are directions for running the human machine. Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain, or a friction, in the running of that machine. That is why these rules at first seem to be constantly interfering with our natural inclinations.

The weakness of modern tragedy[is that] transgression against the social code is made to bring destruction, as though the social code worked our irrevocable fate.

Those...who insist that there are some moral limits that they will not violate, are forever surprising themselves.

Civilization, after all, is defined by what we forbid, more than what we permit.

I think it's important to break taboos for the same reason it's important to break laws and rules - because either you're a slave to them, or you're taking matters into your hands.

Taboo restrictions are distinct from religious or moral prohibitions. They are not based upon any divine ordinance, but may be said to impose themselves on their own account. They differ from moral prohibitions in that they fall into no system that declares quite generally that certain abstinences must be observed and gives reasons for that necessity.

Morality is good, and is accepted of God, as far as it goes; but the difficulty is, it does not go far enough.

That's why every society on the planet has very definite rules, ideas about how sex should be regulated, how sex should be expressed, what's okay, what's not okay. And I guess we do live in a place, and have for a long time, where there's more openness and there's more willingness to tolerate different kinds of behavior, but with that comes people creating other rules and other kinds of controls. It's always going to be a question of what's acceptable and what isn't and what's the danger point and what rouses people's contempt and what people are allowed to get away with.

Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.

For many people, morality means a set of rules governing the disposition on one's genital organs; or a set of injunctions against lying, stealing, or killing except when such acts are sanctioned by church or state.

It bothers me a lot that you want to broadcast that you're associating with black people.

And for this you must have quiet and solitude. But society does not allow you to have them. You must be with people, outwardly active at all costs. If you are alone you are considered antisocial or peculiar, or you are afraid of your own loneliness.

People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place.

Laws, religions, creeds, and systems of ethics, instead of making society better than its best unit, make it worse than its average unit, because they are never up to date.

Most people's lives are a direct reflection of their peer groups.

I would say first of all, anyone who wants to challenge the status quo always gets that response. Ninety percent of the time, that's just bull. That's just the way in which people choose to prop up their own privilege or their own particular position. So mostly I shrug it off.

I believe that living on the edge, living in and through your fear, is the summit of life, and that people who refuse to take that dare condemn themselves to a life of living death.