Henry James famous quotes

It's time to start living the life you've imagined.
-- Henry James

#Inspirational #Positive #Dream

Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.
-- Henry James

#Inspirational #Life #Friendship

Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
-- Henry James

#Friendship #Relationship #Judging

Never say you know the last word about any human heart.
-- Henry James

#Heart #Lasts #Last Words

And remember this, that if you've been hated, you've also been loved.
-- Henry James

#Love #Remember #Hated

We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
-- Henry James

#Inspirational #Life #Art

He was there or was not there: not there if I didn't see him.
-- Henry James

Sorrow comes in great waves...but rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us, it leaves us. And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain.
-- Henry James

#Strong #Hard Times #Sorrow

She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.
-- Henry James

#Elbows #Tables

Ideas are, in truth, force.
-- Henry James

#Learning #Ideas #Force

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
-- Henry James

#Art #Consideration #Force

If this was love, love had been overrated.
-- Henry James

#Overrated

To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that; this, doubtless, is the right way to live.
-- Henry James

#Inspirational #Life #Time

In art economy is always beauty.
-- Henry James

#Art #Crafts #Economy

Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
-- Henry James

#Travel #Venice #Visitors

It is no wonder he wins every game. He has never done a thing in his life exept play games
-- Henry James

#Winning #Games #Play

True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get out - you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.
-- Henry James

#Happiness #Self #Inner Peace

Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!
-- Henry James

#People #Trying #Lost

Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.
-- Henry James

#Delicate #Pursue #Prize

Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.
-- Henry James

#I Hate You #Doors #Imagination

Americans will eat garbage provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup.
-- Henry James

#Food #Sprinkles #Garbage

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
-- Henry James

#Book #Beer #Winning

People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.
-- Henry James

#Nice #People #Leave Me Alone

One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.
-- Henry James

#Country #Civilization #Texture

However British you may be, I am more British still.
-- Henry James

#May #British #Stills

Life is a predicament which precedes death.
-- Henry James

#Life #Judging #Inspire

Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
-- Henry James

#Character #Ideas #Two

The deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer...No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind.
-- Henry James

#Art #Writing #Mind

I think patriotism is like charity -- it begins at home.
-- Henry James

#Home #Thinking #Patriotism

I adore adverbs; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.
-- Henry James

#Literature #Adore #Adverbs

She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.
-- Henry James

#Thinking #Feels

...the great merit of the place is that one can arrange one's life here exactly as one pleases...there are facilities for every kind of habit and taste, and everything is accepted and understood.
-- Henry James

#Paris #Taste #Merit

She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering.
-- Henry James

#Curiosity #Wonder #Staring

I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse.
-- Henry James

#Writing #Bleeding #Butchery

Of course what he most intensely dreams of is being taken out on walks, and the more you are able to indulge him the more will he adore you and the more all the latent beauty of his nature will come out.
-- Henry James

#Dream #Taken #Able

I'm yours for ever--for ever and ever. Here I stand; I'm as firm as a rock. If you'll only trust me, how little you'll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours.
-- Henry James

#Rocks #Littles #Trust Me

We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have.
-- Henry James

#Dark #Giving

Excellence does not require perfection.
-- Henry James

#Perfection #Excellence #Doe

The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.
-- Henry James

#Lucky #Right Time #So Lucky

I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination.
-- Henry James

#People #Imagination #Requirements

Everything about Florence seems to be colored with a mild violet, like diluted wine.
-- Henry James

#Wine #Florence #Violet

Writing is not primarily escape, but use.
-- Henry James

#Writing #Use

I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.
-- Henry James

#Thinking #Judging #Judgement

Don't pass it by--the immediate, the real, the only, the yours.
-- Henry James

#Real

I don't want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.
-- Henry James

#Friendship #Integrity #Self Esteem

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
-- Henry James

#History #Historical #Literature

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
-- Henry James

#History #Tourism #Literature

You must save what you can of your life; you musn't lose it all simply because you've lost a part.
-- Henry James

#Lost

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.
-- Henry James

#Writing #Doe #Reason

Live all you can; it's a mistake not to.
-- Henry James

#Mistake #Inspirational Life

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.
-- Henry James

#Appreciate #Intellectual #Criticism

What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?
-- Henry James

#Inspirational #Determination #Character

Until you try, you don't know what you can't do.
-- Henry James

#Trying

To live in the world of creation-to get into it and stay in it-to frequent it and haunt it...to think intently and fruitfully, to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation-this is the only thing.
-- Henry James

#Fear #Inspiration #Thinking

Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
-- Henry James

#Beautiful #Summer #Time

Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.
-- Henry James

#Reading #Epic #Envelopes

You think too much.' 'I suppose I do; but I can’t help it, my mind is so terribly active. When I give myself, I give myself. I pay the penalty in my headaches, my famous headaches--a perfect circlet of pain! But I carry it as a queen carries her crown.
-- Henry James

#Queens #Pain #Thinking

Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
-- Henry James

#Life #Tea #Literature

To believe in a child is to believe in the Future.
-- Henry James

#Children #Believe

Make him [the reader] think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications.
-- Henry James

#Writing #Thinking #Evil

I am blackly bored when they are at large and at work; but somehow I am still more blackly bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them.
-- Henry James

#Bored #Feminism #Shut Up

She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy!
-- Henry James

#Darkness #Lighthouse

We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are.
-- Henry James

#People #Care #Proportion

What is either a picture or a novel that is not character?
-- Henry James

#Writing #Character #Novel

One of my latest sensations was going to Lady Airlie's to hear Browning read his own poems - with the comport of finding that, at least, if you don't understand them, he himself apparently understands them even less. He read them as if he hated them and would like to bite them to pieces.
-- Henry James

#Reading #Pieces #Hated

Most English talk is a quadrille in a sentry-box.
-- Henry James

That accurst autobiographic form which puts a premium on the loose, the improvised, the cheap, and the easy.
-- Henry James

#Crafts #Easy #Form

Little by little, even with other cares, the slowly but surely working poison of the garden-mania begins to stir in my long-sluggish veins.
-- Henry James

#Caring #Garden #Long

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete
-- Henry James

It doesn't matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life.
-- Henry James

#Long #Matter #Particular

An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue.
-- Henry James

#Tongue #Natural #Englishmen

The artist beholds in nature more than she herself Nature is conscious of.
-- Henry James

#Art #Artist #Conscious

We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosity.
-- Henry James

#Practice #Generosity #Novel

It is indeed immensely picturesque. I can fancy sitting all a summer's day watching its shadows shorten and lengthen again, and drawing a delicious contrast between the world's duration and the feeble span of individual experience. There is something in Stonehenge almost reassuring; and if you are disposed to feel that life is rather a superficial matter, and that we soon get to the bottom of things, the immemorial gray pillars may serve to remind you of the enormous background of time.
-- Henry James

#Summer #Drawing #Shadow

The "germ," wherever gathered, has ever been for me, "the germ of a story," and most of the stories strained to shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as remote and windblown as a casual hint.
-- Henry James

#Hands #Germs #Hints

The image of the presence, whatever it was, waiting there for him to go -this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he stopped short of the point at which certainty would have come to him. For, with all his resolution, or more exactly with all his dread, he did stop short - he hung back from really seeing. The risk was too great and his fear too definite: it took at this moment an awful specific form.
-- Henry James

#Fear #Waiting #Risk

His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed.
-- Henry James

#Kissing #White #Sensual

We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donn´e: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.
-- Henry James

#Artist #Ideas #Criticism

If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.
-- Henry James

#Land #America #Would Be

To treat a big subject in the intensely summarized fashion demanded by an evening's traffic of the stage when the evening, freely clipped at each end, is reduced to two hours and a half, is a feat of which the difficulty looms large.
-- Henry James

#Fashion #Two #Theatre

It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.
-- Henry James

#Poetry #Effort #Mind

If we pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow him his freedom of choice , in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify.
-- Henry James

#Artist #Choices #Faces

All intimacies are based on differences.
-- Henry James

#Marriage #Differences #Intimacy

The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be . . .
-- Henry James

#Fire #House #Stories

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance.
-- Henry James

#Art #Importance #Interest

There are women who are for all your 'times of life.' They're the most wonderful sort.
-- Henry James

#Wonderful

The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality.
-- Henry James

#Character #Reality #Color

No themes are so human as those that reflect for us, out of the confusion of life, the close connection of bliss and bale, of the things that help with the things that hurt, so dangling before us forever that bright hard medal, of so strange an alloy, one face of which is somebody's right and ease and the other somebody's pain and wrong.
-- Henry James

#Hurt #Pain #Confusion

The effect, if not the prime office, of criticism is to make our absorption and our enjoyment of the things that feed the mind as aware of itself as possible, since that awareness quickens the mental demand, which thus in turn wanders further and further for pasture. This action on the part of the mind practically amounts to a reaching out for the reasons of its interest, as only by its ascertaining them can the interest grow more various. This is the very education of our imaginative life.
-- Henry James

#Office #Mind #Criticism

We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art...what we are talking about and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered. I think I don't regret a single "excess" of my responsive youth I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.
-- Henry James

#Beautiful #Art #Regret

The critical sense is so far from frequent that it is absolutely rare, and the possession of the cluster of qualities that minister to it is one of the highest distinctions... In this light one sees the critic as the real helper of the artist, a torchbearing outrider, the interpreter, the brother... Just in proportion as he is sentient and restless, just in proportion as he reacts and reciprocates and penetrates, is the critic a valuable instrument.
-- Henry James

#Brother #Real #Artist

The practice of "reviewing"... in general has nothing in common with the art of criticism.
-- Henry James

#Art #Practice #Criticism

Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions.
-- Henry James

#Art #Exercise #Flying

I have only to let myself go! So I have said all my life, yet I have never fully done it.
-- Henry James

#Freedom #Done #Said

Art is a point of view, and a genius way of looking at things.
-- Henry James

#Art #Views #Genius

One is oneself a fine consequence.
-- Henry James

#Fine #Oneself #Consequence

The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.
-- Henry James

#Liberty #Use #Want

The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself.
-- Henry James

#Men #World #May

It might seem that an egg which has succeeded in being fresh has done all that can reasonably be expected of it.
-- Henry James

#Eggs #Done #Might

I recall my fleeting instants in Savannah as the taste of a cup charged to the brim.
-- Henry James

#Fleeting #Savannah #Taste