55 Meaningful Quotes by Arthur Miller
Arthur Asher Miller (born October 17, 1915, New York, New York, U.S. – died February 10, 2005, Roxbury, Connecticut, U.S.) was an American playwright, essayist, and screenwriter.
Miller’s most prominent plays are All My Sons (published in 1947; adapted for film in 1948), The Crucible (1953; adapted for film in 1996), A View from the Bridge (1955), and After the Fall (1964).
The play Death of a Salesman (1949; adapted for film in 1985) is one of the most famous American dramas of the 20th century. It won a Tony Award for best play and a Pulitzer Prize for drama.
Miller also wrote several screenplays, most notably The Misfits (1961).
His second wife was the actress Marilyn Monroe. They were married from 1956 to 1961.
Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.The Crucible (1953), Act II, Page 71
The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you’re a salesman, and you don’t know that.Death Of A Salesman (1949), Act II, Page 97
Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991), Act I, Page 18
A child’s spirit is like a child, you can never catch it by running after it; you must stand still, and, for love, it will soon itself come back.The Crucible (1953), Act I, Page 27
The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.Shadows of the Gods, in Harper's Magazine (August 1958), Vol. 217, No. 1299, Page 37
Work a lifetime to pay off a house. You finally own it, and there’s nobody to live in it.Death Of A Salesman (1949), Act I, Page 15
A little man makes a mistake and they hang him by the thumbs, the big ones become ambassadors.All My Sons (1947), Act II, Page 60
I think it’s a mistake to ever look for hope outside one’s self.After the Fall (1964), Act I, Page 21
You can quicker get back a million dollars that was stole than a word that you gave away.A View from the Bridge (ed. 1957), Act I, Page 16
A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from. And by those he has walked away from that cause him remorse.Timebends: A Life (1987), Page 367
Down deep in His heart God is a comedian who loves to make us laugh.Timebends: A Life (1987), Page 591
There are certain men in the world who rather see everybody hung before they’ll take blame.All My Sons (1947), Act III, Page 61
The world is an oyster, but you don’t crack it open on a mattress!Death Of A Salesman (1949), Act I, Page 41
Can one ever remember love? It’s like trying to summon up the smell of roses in a cellar. You might see a rose, but never the perfume.After the Fall (1964), Act II, Page 86
There are certain people, y’know, the sicker they get the longer they live.All My Sons (1947), Act II, Page 38
The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.Psychology and Arthur Miller by Richard Isadore Evans (1969), Part II. The Writer and Psychology, Page 73
A man is not a bird, to come and go with the springtime.Death Of A Salesman (1949), Act I, Page 54
A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.The Observer, London (November 26, 1961)
The theater is so endlessly fascinating – because it’s so accidental. It’s so much like life.Arthur Miller: View of a Life by Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times (May 9, 1984)
You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away – a man is not a piece of fruit!]Death of a Salesman (1949), Act II, Page 82
You don’t realize how people can hate, they can hate so much they’ll tear the world to pieces.All My Sons (1947), Act II, Page 38
You know, a playwright lives in an occupied country. He’s the enemy. And if you can’t live that way you don’t stay.Why Write for the Theater? A Roundtable Report, The New York Times (February 9, 1986)
The enemy is within, and within stays within, and we can’t get out of within. It’s always on the edge of our minds that behind what we see is a nefarious plot.The Demons of Salem, With Us Still by Victory Navasky, The New York Times (September 8, 1996)
The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.Arthur Miller's Collected Plays: With an Introduction (1957), Introduction to the Collected Plays, Page 7
If you love your country why is it necessary to hate other countries?Incident at Vichy: A Play (1965), Page 39
Success, instead of giving freedom of choice, becomes a way of life.Conversations with Arthur Miller (1987), The Art of the Theatre II: Arthur Miller, an Interview by Olga Carlisle and Rose Styron (Paris Review, 1966), Page 99
What is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? These people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all.With respect for her agony - but with love by Arthur Miller, Life, (February 7, 1964), Page 66
Without alienation, there can be no politics.A Miller's Tale by Eric Hobsbawm, Marxism Today (January 1989), Page 42
Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You’ll never get out of the jungle that way.Death Of A Salesman (1949), Act I, Page 49
Life is God’s most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it.The Crucible (1953), Act IV, Page 133
We used to shoot a man who acted like a dog, but honor was real there, you were protecting something. But here? This is the land of the great big dogs, you don’t love a man here, you eat him! That’s the principle; the only one we live by.All My Sons (1947), Act III, Page 78
The very impulse to write, I think, springs from an inner chaos crying for order, for meaning, and that meaning must be discovered in the process of writing or the work lies dead as it is finished.Arthur Miller's Collected Plays: With an Introduction (1957), Introduction to the Collected Plays, Page 38
If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp… The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence.Conversations with Arthur Miller (1987), The Art of the Theatre II: Arthur Miller, an Interview by Olga Carlisle and Rose Styron (Paris Review, 1966), Page 108
The need of man to wholly realize himself is the only fixed star.Tragedy and the Common Man by Arthur Miller, in The New York Times (February 27, 1949)
Peace. It is a providence, and no great change; we are only what we always were, but naked now.The Crucible (1953), Act II, Page 81
The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less.Foreword, in After the Fall, Saturady Evening Post (February 1, 1964)
One had the right to write because other people needed news of the inner world, and if they went too long without such news they would go mad with the chaos of their lives.Shadows of the Gods, in Harper's Magazine (August 1958), Vol. 217, No. 1299, Page 37
Memory inevitably romanticizes, pressing reality to recede like pain.Timebends: A Life (1987), Page 179
Where choice begins. Paradise ends. Innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?Foreword, in After the Fall, Saturady Evening Post (February 1, 1964)
I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing-his sense of personal dignity.Tragedy and the Common Man by Arthur Miller, in The New York Times (February 27, 1949)
And of course the time comes when you realize that you haven’t merely been specializing in something – something has been specializing in you.The Price (1968), Act II, Page 81
Theater is a very changeable art. It responds to the moment in history the way the newspaper does, and there’s no predicting what to come up with next.A Conversation with Arthur Miller by Chairman William R. Ferris, Humanities (March-April 2001) Vol. 22, No. 2, Page 43
Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastimes of literary life is the game of Find the Author.With respect for her agony - but with love by Arthur Miller, Life, (February 7, 1964), Page 66
When the government goes into the business of destroying trust, it goes into the business of destroying itself.Conversations with Arthur Miller (1987), An Interview with Arthur Miller by Matthew C. Roudané (Michigan Quarterly Review 24, 1985), Page 364
People do look to others for some leadership, and it’s not bad for them to supply it when they feel that way.A Conversation with Arthur Miller by Chairman William R. Ferris, Humanities (March-April 2001) Vol. 22, No. 2, Page 43
A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence.The Crucible (1953), Act I, Page 35
After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.Death Of A Salesman (1949), Act II, Page 98
