Life & Wisdom Quote by Henry Miller

Miller’s line is a provocation dressed up as prophecy: stop imagining yourself as capable of transcendence and you’ll start living like you were born to crawl. The shock tactic is deliberate. “Become gods” isn’t theology so much as a dare - an obscene, ego-flattering metaphor for artistic and erotic self-invention. Miller spent his career insulting respectable pieties while smuggling in a private gospel: the self is salvageable only through appetite, risk, and creation. In that frame, unbelief isn’t atheism; it’s surrender.

The sentence works because it weaponizes extremity. No middle state is allowed. You either reach upward or rot downward. That false binary is the point: Miller is attacking the modern habit of shrinking the human project into mere compliance - a life of wages, routines, polite cynicism. “Worms” carries the stink of both humiliation and decomposition, a reminder that without a felt horizon of greatness, you don’t just become modest; you become consumable.

Context matters. Miller wrote against the backdrop of the 20th century’s mechanical brutalities - war, mass society, bureaucratic life - and against a literary culture he thought had traded vision for decorum. The subtext is less “believe in heaven” than “keep a metaphysical spine.” People need an animating myth of their own potential, even if it’s irrational, even if it’s scandalous. Lose that, and you don’t get enlightened realism; you get resignation with better lighting.