Henry Miller Quotes

Father asked us what was God's noblest work. Anna said men, but I said babies. Men are often bad, but babies never are.

Nobody lives up to the norms that God had in mind when he first created human beings.

An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise.

If God had made a perfect world, it would be a magic trick, not creation, with no meaning or place for us to learn and create. Mankind is not yet ready for a perfect world. We do not know how to appreciate perfection.

If we knew exactly what animal life was like before the fall into sin and knew what nature was like before the law of entropy invaded it, we would already be living in heaven.

God created the first man, whom he called Adam. Then God created a woman, whom ho named Eve; and this man and woman were given the power from Jehovah God to reproduce their kind, that is to say, to cause conception and birth of children.

Man is God's highest present development. He is the latest thing in God.

The Lord made Adam, the Lord made Eve, he made 'em both a little bit naive.

We are God's creation, and we have a responsibility to keep ourselves at our best.

The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.

Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.

Character is the result of two great forces: the initial force which the Creator gave it when He called the man into being; and the force of all the external influence and culture that mold and modify the development of a life.

From the time of Adam and Eve, man has tried to escape suffering in any form.

The terrible, tragic fallacy of the last hundred years has been to think that all man's troubles are due to his environment, and that to change the man you have nothing to do but change his environment. That is a tragic fallacy. It overlooks the fact that it was in Paradise that man fell.

There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.

We are all the time, from our childhood, trying to lay the blame upon something outside ourselves. We are always standing up to set right other people, and not ourselves. If we are miserable, we say, "Oh, the world is a devil's world." We curse others and say, "What infatuated fools!" But why should we be in such a world, if we really are so good? If this is a devil's world, we must be devils also; why else should we be here? "Oh, the people of the world are so selfish!" True enough; but why should we be found in that company, if we be better? Just think of that.

We are in danger of forgetting that we cannot do what God does, and that God will not do what we can do. We cannot save ourselves nor sanctify ourselves, God does that; but God will not give us good habits, He will not give us character, He will not make us walk aright. We have to do all that ourselves.

We all long for Eden, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most human, is still soaked with the sense of exile.

We plant sod where God wants 2 plant seed. He's more interested in growing our character than having us look finished.

Man Is Something That Must Be Overcome

The development of our minds and our destination in future lives is in our hands. No one else can help us. It is very important that we each take responsibility for ourselves. Sustain mindfulness 24 hours a day. Thank you. That is all.

It is not for man to rest in absolute contentment. He is born to hopes and aspirations as the sparks fly upward, unless he has brutalized his nature and quenched the spirit of immortality which is his portion.

Original sin is in us like our beard. We are shaved today and look clean; tomorrow our beard has grown again, nor does it cease growing while we remain on earth. In like manner original sin cannot be extirpated from us; it springs up in us as long as we live.

I think it is in the nature of individuals and individual entities not to self-correct.