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Henry Miller (1891-1980, American author) | Dreams and Dreaming |
| The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal.
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Rating: 3.00
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Obscurity |
| The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary.
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Bores and Boredom |
| 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.
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Gender |
| The loss of sex polarity is part and parcel of the larger disintegration, the reflex of the soul's death, and coincident with the disappearance of great men, great deeds, great causes, great wars, etc.
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Humanity |
| The man who is forever disturbed about the condition of humanity either has no problems of his own or has refused to face them.
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Insecurity |
| The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble.
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Observation |
| The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.
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Novelty |
| The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive.
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Peace of Mind |
| The only peace, the only security, is in fulfillment.
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Rating: 3.00
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Love |
| The only thing we can never get enough of is love. And the only thing we never give enough of is love.
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Heroes and Heroism |
| The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference.
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Prison |
| The prisoner is not the one who has committed a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over.
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Enemies |
| The real enemy can always be met and conquered, or won over. Real antagonism is based on love, a love which has not recognized itself.
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Leaders and Leadership |
| The real leader has no need to lead -- he is content to point the way.
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Disasters |
| The stabbing horror of life is not contained in calamities and disasters, because these things wake one up and one gets very familiar and intimate with them and finally they become tame again. No, it is more like being in a hotel room in Hoboken let us say, and just enough money in one's pocket for another meal.
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Rating: 3.50
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Criminals and Crime |
| The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself. All that you despise, all that you loathe, all that you reject, all that you condemn and seek to convert by punishment springs from you.
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Rating: 5.00
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Mind |
| The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.
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Civilization |
| The word "civilization" to my mind is coupled with death. When I use the word, I see civilization as a crippling, thwarting thing, a stultifying thing. For me it was always so. I don't believe in the golden ages, you see... civilization is the arteriosclerosis of culture.
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Waste |
| The word which gives the key to the national vice is waste. And people who are wasteful are not wise, neither can they remain young and vigorous. In order to transmute energy to higher and more subtle levels one must first conserve it.
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Meaning of Life |
| The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order.
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Death and Dying |
| The world is the mirror of myself dying.
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Rating: 5.00
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Greatness |
| The world isn't kept running because it's a paying proposition. (God doesn't make a cent on the deal.) The world goes on because a few men in every generation believe in it utterly, accept it unquestioningly; they underwrite it with their lives.
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Rating: 4.00
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Failure |
| The world itself is pregnant with failure, is the perfect manifestation of imperfection, of the consciousness of failure.
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Vision |
| There are lone figures armed only with ideas, sometimes with just one idea, who blast away whole epochs in which we are enwrapped like mummies. Some are powerful enough to resurrect the dead. Some steal on us unawares and put a spell over us which it takes centuries to throw off. Some put a curse on us, for our stupidity and inertia, and then it seems as if God himself were unable to lift it.
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Fear |
| There is nothing strange about fear: no matter in what guise it presents itself, it is something with which we are all so familiar that when a man appears who is without it, we are at once enslaved by him.
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Courage |
| There is something healthy and invigorating about direct action.
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Creativity |
| There is the happiness which comes from creative effort. The joy of dreaming, creating, building, whether in painting a picture, writing an epic, singing a song, composing a symphony, devising new invention, creating a vast industry.
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Books and Reading |
| This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing.
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Land |
| Topographically the country is magnificent -- and terrifying. Why terrifying? Because nowhere else in the world is the divorce between man and nature so complete. Nowhere have I encountered such a dull, monotonous fabric of life as here in America. Here boredom reaches its peak.
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Books and Reading |
| A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat.
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Writing and Writers |
| A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.
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New World |
| A new world is not made simply by trying to forget the old. A new world is made with a new spirit, with new values. Our world may have begun that way, but today it is caricature. Our world is a world of things. What we dread most, in the face of the impending debacle, is that we shall be obliged to give up our gewgaws, our gadgets, all the little comforts that have made us so uncomfortable. We are not peaceful souls; we are smug, timid, queasy and quaky.
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Rating: 2.00
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Actors and Acting |
| Actors die so loud.
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Americans and America |
| Actually we are a vulgar, pushing mob whose passions are easily mobilized by demagogues, newspaper men, religious quacks, agitators and such like. To call this a society of free peoples is blasphemous. What have we to offer the world besides the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the maniacal delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment?
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Writing and Writers |
| After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.
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Growth |
| All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous, unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.
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Rating: 2.75
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Books and Reading |
| All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.
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Rating: 2.00
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Creativity |
| All the lies and evasions by which man has nourished himself -- civilization, in a word is the fruits of the creative artist. It is the creative nature of man which has refused to let him lapse back into that unconscious unity with life which characterizes the animal world from which he made his escape.
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Solitude |
| An artist is always alone -- if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.
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Psychoanalysis |
| Analysis brings no curative powers in its train; it merely makes us conscious of the existence of an evil, which, oddly enough, is consciousness.
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Potential |
| And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words?
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Philosophers and Philosophy |
| Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.
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Arts and Artists |
| Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.
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Arts and Artists |
| Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.
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Faith |
| Back of every creation, supporting it like an arch, is faith. Enthusiasm is nothing: it comes and goes. But if one believes, then miracles occur.
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Rating: 2.50
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Chaos |
| Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.
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Civilization |
| Civilization is drugs, alcohol, engines of war, prostitution, machines and machine slaves, low wages, bad food, bad taste, prisons, reformatories, lunatic asylums, divorce, perversion, brutal sports, suicides, infanticide, cinema, quackery, demagogy, strikes, lockouts, revolutions, putsches, colonization, electric chairs, guillotines, sabotage, floods, famine, disease, gangsters, money barons, horse racing, fashion shows, poodle dogs, chow dogs, Siamese cats, condoms, peccaries, syphilis, gonorrhea, insanity, neuroses, etc., etc.
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Rating: 5.00
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Confusion |
| Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not yet understood.
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Rating: 3.50
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Passion |
| Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music -- the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.
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Boys |
| Every genuine boy is a rebel and an anarch. If he were allowed to develop according to his own instincts, his own inclinations, society would undergo such a radical transformation as to make the adult revolutionary cower and cringe.
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Rating: 2.33
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