The Cosmological Eye Quotes

“All my life I have felt a great kinship with the madman and the criminal. Practically all my life I have dwelt in big cities; I am unhappy, uneasy, unless I am in a big city. My feeling for Nature is limited to water, mountain and desert. These three form a trine which is more imperative, for me, than any spiritual alimentation. But in the city I am aware of another element which is beyond all these in power of fascination: the labyrinth. To be lost in a strange city is the greatest joy I know; to become oriented is to lose everything. To me the city is crime personified, insanity personified. I feel at home.”
― Henry Miller, The Cosmological Eye

“Tomorrow is no hazardous affair, a day like any other day: tomorrow is the result of many yesterdays and comes with a potent, cumulative effect. I am tomorrow what I chose to be yesterday and the day before. It is not possible that tomorrow I may negate and nullify everything that led me to this present moment.”
― Henry Miller, The Cosmological Eye

“Peace! It's wonderful!”
― Henry Miller, The Cosmological Eye

“It's like saying to a drowning man: What a pity, what a pity! If you had only let me teach you how to swim! Everybody wants to right the world, nobody wants help his neighbor. They want to make a man of you without taking your body into consideration. It's all cockeyed.”
― Henry Miller, The Cosmological Eye

“If there be any solution of life's problems for the mass of mankind, in this biological continuum which we have entered upon, there is certainly little hope of any for the individual, i.e, the artist. For him the problem is not how to identify himself with the mass about, for in that lies his real death, but how to fecundate the masses by his dying.”
― Henry Miller, The Cosmological Eye

“How speak about an art which no one recognizes as an art? I know that a great deal has already been written about the "art of the cinema". One can read about it most every day in the newspapers & the magazines. But it is not the art of the cinema which you will find discussed therein--it is rather dire, botched embryo as it now stands revealed before our eyes, the still-birth which was mangled in the womb by the obstetricians of art.”
― Henry Miller, The Cosmological Eye

“I understand full well that it is not the mob which creates the films we see—not technically, at any rate. But in a deeper sense it is the mob which actually creates the films. For the first time in the history of art the mob has dictated what the artist should do.”
― Henry Miller, The Cosmological Eye

“Everything that happened to him was of a bad nature. It couldn’t be otherwise. He lived in the expectation that things would grow worse, and of course they always did.”
― Henry Miller, The Cosmological Eye

“There are people to whom you feel immediately attracted, not because you like them, but because you detest them. You detest them so heartily that your curiosity is aroused; you come back to them again and again to study them, to arouse in yourself a feeling of compassion which is really absent. You do things for them, not because you feel any sympathy for them, but because their suffering is incomprehensible to you.”
― Henry Miller, The Cosmological Eye

“I should say that ever since the dawn of history—all through the great civilizations, that is to say—we have been living like lice. Once every thousand years or so a man arises who is not a louse—and then there is even more hell to pay. When a MAN appears he seems to get a stranglehold on the world which it takes centuries to break. The sane people are cunning enough to find these men “psychopathic.” These sane ones seem to be more interested in the technique of the stranglehold than in applying it. That’s a curious phenomenon, one that puzzles me, to be frank. It’s like learning the art of wrestling in order to have the pleasure of letting someone pin you to the mat.”
― Henry Miller, The Cosmological Eye