Faith & Spirit Quote by Henry Miller

Miller isn’t praising imagination as a cute creative hobby; he’s drafting a theology for the artist as outlaw. “Voice of daring” recasts imagination as an act of nerve, not taste. You can almost hear his contempt for the safe virtues: discipline, prudence, respectability. For Miller, imagination isn’t the decoration on life; it’s the muscle that breaks the lock.

The provocation lands harder in the second line. “If there is anything Godlike about God it is that” is a sly reversal: God’s divinity isn’t moral perfection or omnipotence, but artistic audacity. Miller strips religion down to a single creative gesture and, in doing so, steals that gesture for the writer. The subtext is brazen: the holy act isn’t obedience, it’s invention. If God “dared to imagine everything,” then making worlds on the page becomes a kind of sanctioned blasphemy - not denying God, but competing with Him on the only metric that matters.

Context matters. Miller came up in the early 20th century when modernism was shattering old forms, and his own work (especially Tropic of Cancer) became synonymous with censorship battles and the insistence that personal candor could be literature. This line reads like a manifesto from that front: a defense of the artist’s right to dream offensively, expansively, without asking permission.

It works because it flatters the reader’s hunger for scale. Miller doesn’t argue that imagination is useful; he dares you to treat it as the most sacred power humans can exercise - and dares you to live like you believe it.