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"I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object."
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"Works of art are infinitely solitary and nothing is less likely to reach them than criticism. Only love can grasp them and hold them and do them justice."
"In an animal's or a plant's expression of imagination (let's leave out the rest for now, so we don't have to deal with the question of consciousness in, for example, minerals), there is always purity in the connection between need and evolution. That which is created is a response to reality and very specific, essential concerns. This then is the origin of the union between what is so and mysterious harmony-truth and beauty. The bridge between them is inspired intuition and the actions it causes. Or, imagination causes inspiration causes intuition causes beauty, which then causes imagination again."
"A goatee is to beards what diamonds are to ornaments."
"The light music of whisky falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude."
"The quality of beauty lies on how beholder values an object."
"The cat . . . is for the man who appreciates beauty as the one living force in a blind and purposeless universe."
"I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That's what people are always doing in art. They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist or something and then they put him in a drawer and don't see him as a living individual painter any more."
"The noble buoyancy of her attitude, its suggestion of soaring grace, revealed the touch of poetry in her beauty that Selden always felt in her presence, yet lost the sense of when he was not with her. Its expression was now so vivid that for the first time he seemed to see before him the real Lily Bart, divested of all the trivialities of her little world, and catching for a moment a note of that eternal harmony of whichher beauty was a part."
"Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed."
"était tard ; ainsi qu’une médaille neuve
La pleine lune s’étalait,
Et la solennité de la nuit, comme un fleuve
Sur Paris dormant ruisselait."
Explore more quotes by Henry Miller
"It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd."
"I see America spreading disaster. I see America as a black curse upon the world. I see a long night settling in and that mushroom which has poisoned the world withering at the roots."
"Art consists in going the full length. If you start with the drums you have to end with dynamite, or TNT."
"One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life."
"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."
"You can forgive a young cunt anything. A young cunt doesn't have to have brains. They're better without brains. But an old cunt, even if she's brilliant, even if she's the most charming woman in the world, nothing makes any difference. A young cunt is an investment; an old cunt is a dead loss. All they can do for you is buy you things. But that doesn't put meat on their arms or juice between their legs."
"Whoever uses the spirit that isin him creatively is an artist. Tomake living itself an art, that isthe goal."
"Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery."
"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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