Henry Miller · 196 pages
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“Let me be, was all I wanted. Be what I am, no matter how I am.”
― Henry Miller, quote from Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
“Everyone has his own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality there is.”
― Henry Miller, quote from Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
“I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous [person], the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the [person] in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable.”
― Henry Miller, quote from Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
“Who but the artist has the power to open man up, to set free the imagination? The others - priest, teacher, saint, statesman, warrior - hold us to the path of history. They keep us chained to the rock, that the vultures may eat out our hearts. It is the artist who has the courage to go against the crowd; he is the unrecognized "hero of our time" - and of all time.”
― Henry Miller, quote from Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
“either you take in believing in miracles or you stand still like the hummingbird.”
― Henry Miller, quote from Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
“The worst is not death but being blind, blind to the fact that everything about life is in the nature of the miraculous. The language of society is conformity; the language of the creative individual is freedom. Life will continue to be a hell as long as people who make up the world shut their eyes to reality.”
― Henry Miller, quote from Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
“It is our destiny to live with the wrong as well as the right kind of citizens, and to learn from them, the wrong-minded ones, as much or more as from others. If we have not yet succeeded -after how many centuries?- in eliminating from life the elements which plague us perhaps we need to question life more closely. Perhaps our refusal to face reality is the only ill we suffer from, and all the rest but illusion and delusion. (p.26)”
― Henry Miller, quote from Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
“It was the end for me. And yet not an end. In all the years which have since elapsed she remains the woman I loved and lost, the unattainable one [...] I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous man, the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the man in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable.
—Henry Miller, Stand Still like the Hummingbird (1962)”
― Henry Miller, quote from Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
“But it is not emancipation that the great majority seeks. When pressed, most men will admit that it takes but little to be happy. (Not that they practice this wisdom!) Man craves happiness here on earth, not fulfillment, not emancipation. Are they utterly deluded, then, in seeking happiness? No, happiness is desirable, but it is a by-product, the result of a way of life, not a goal which is forever beyond one's grasp. Happiness is achieved en route. And if it be ephemeral, as most men believe, it can also give way, not to anxiety of despair, but to a joyousness which is serene and lasting. To make happiness the goal is to kill it in advance. If one must have a goal, which is questionable, why not self-realization? The unique and healing quality in this attitude toward life is that in the process goal and seeker become one.”
― Henry Miller, quote from Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
“Man, as man, has never realized himself. The greater part of him, his potential being, has always been submerged. What is history if not the endless story of his repeated failures?”
― Henry Miller, quote from Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
“Every day the choice is presented to us, in a thousand different ways, to live up to the spirit which is in us or to deny it. Whenever we talk about right and wrong we are turning the light of scrutiny upon our neighbors instead of upon ourselves. We judge in order not to be judged. We uphold the law, because it is easier than to defy it. We are all lawbreakers, all criminals, all murderers, at heart. It is not our business to get after the murderers, but to get after the murderer which exists in each and every one of us. And I mean by murder the supreme kind which consists in murdering the spirit.”
― Henry Miller, quote from Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
“There are times when I myself no longer know whether I said and did the things I report or whether I dreamed them up. Anyway, I always dream true. If I lie a bit now and then it is mainly in the interest of truth.”
― Henry Miller, quote from Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
“He is sure to be more happy who has eaten well and slept well and has besides a little money in his jeans. Such men are rare to find for the simple reason that most men are incapable of appreciating the wisdom of such a simple truth. The worker thinks he would be better off if he were running the factory; the owner of the factory thinks the would be better off if he were a financier; and the financier knows he would be better off if he were clean out of the bloody mess and living the simple life.”
― Henry Miller, quote from Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
Henry Miller
Born place: in Yorkville, Manhattan, New York City, The United States
Born date December 26, 1891
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“So what the media do, in effect, is to take the set of assumptions which express the basic ideas of the propaganda system, whether about the Cold War or the economic system or the “national interest” and so on, and then present a range of debate within that framework—so the debate only enhances the strength of the assumptions, ingraining them in people’s minds as the entire possible spectrum of opinion that there is.”
― Noam Chomsky, quote from Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky
“I was able to come home to my family that didn’t give a shit who I would grow up loving. I was able to have my dad teach me how to fight back, and not because he thought his son was a pansy, but because his son was a pansy who wanted to fight back. I was able to come home and sit on a chair while my mother kneeled before me, wiping the blood from a cut on my forehead where Donnie Craig’s fist had hit me. I got to see the anger in their eyes, but it was never directed toward me. It was directed at everyone who thought they could hurt me. It was directed at anyone who thought I was something less than what I was. My parents never made me feel like I was something I wasn’t. They never tried to change me or break me down. They”
― T.J. Klune, quote from Tell Me It's Real
“What happened?”
Bria shrugged. “I waited until I was sure there was no one else around who could get hurt, then threw my coffee in the bastard’s face and took away his gun. While he was screaming from the pain and the second-degree burns, I cuffed his ass and hauled him down to the station. End of story.”
Fin gave my sister a warm, admiring look. “Nice takedown, detective. Even if you should have found another way to do it. Don’t you know that you never, ever waste a cup of coffee like that?”
― Jennifer Estep, quote from Spider’s Revenge
“A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it. A well constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard, but conform to these principles.”
― Aristotle, quote from Poetics
“Thus, with the good we have the bad: we have the opposed movements of a dancer guided by one artistic plan; we recognize in his steps the good as against the bad, and see that in the opposition lies the merit of the design.”
― Plotinus, quote from The Enneads
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