Life & Wisdom Quote by Henry Miller

Miller doesn’t so much dismiss morality as strip it of its pretensions. By piling up “moralities, ethics, laws, customs, beliefs, doctrines” in a breathless list, he makes the whole apparatus of social life sound like bureaucracy: categories with labels, clipboards, and punishments. “Trifling import” is the provocation. It’s a dare to anyone who confuses compliance with meaning.

Then he pivots to his real fetish: transformation. “All that matters is that the miraculous become the norm” isn’t religious consolation; it’s an aesthetic and existential demand. Miller wants a life where intensity isn’t a holiday but a baseline, where the senses and the imagination aren’t rationed out by convention. The subtext is that ethics, in practice, often function as crowd-control: a system for keeping the unpredictable, ecstatic, or sexually frank safely contained. Calling for the miraculous to become ordinary is his way of legitimizing the unruly parts of being alive.

Context sharpens the point. Miller wrote against the grain of early-to-mid 20th-century respectability, when obscenity trials and moral gatekeeping policed what could be said and desired. His work treats institutions as deadening scripts and treats “miracle” as a synonym for creative freedom, erotic honesty, and un-managed experience. There’s a cynicism here, but also a utopian stubbornness: if the world insists on normalizing repression, he insists on normalizing wonder.

It’s also a self-defense mechanism. By demoting morality to “trifling,” Miller clears rhetorical space for the artist to be unaccountable to polite society, accountable only to aliveness.