Henry James Quotes

Excellence does not require perfection.

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

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.

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

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

...I am incapable of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel, I say - feel for all you're worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live...

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance... and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

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

Deep experience is never peaceful.

There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.

I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to under value them.

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

if you are going to be pushed you had better jump

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

She had an unequalled gift, usually pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into opportunities.

Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.

I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it.

Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.

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

I take up my own pen again - the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. To myself - today - I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.

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

The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy... what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be?

I think patriotism is like charity — it begins at home.

New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.

What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?

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

To read between the lines was easier than to follow the text.

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.

There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful useless things.