Authors
Henry James Quotes
Best Quotes by Henry James (Top 10)
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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 -
She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.
Henry James -
Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
Henry James -
It's time to start living the life you've imagined.
Henry James -
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 -
There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
Henry James -
Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had?
Henry James -
Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.
Henry James -
And remember this, that if you've been hated, you've also been loved.
Henry James -
Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
Henry James
More Henry James Quotes
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Excellence does not require perfection.
Henry James -
The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.
Henry James -
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 -
You must save what you can of your life; you musn't lose it all simply because you've lost a part.
Henry James -
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.
Henry James -
...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...
Henry James -
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.
Henry James -
Life is a predicament which precedes death.
Henry James -
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
Henry James -
Deep experience is never peaceful.
Henry James -
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.
Henry James -
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.
Henry James -
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.
Henry James -
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.
Henry James -
Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
Henry James -
if you are going to be pushed you had better jump
Henry James -
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 -
She had an unequalled gift, usually pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into opportunities.
Henry James -
Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.
Henry James -
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.
Henry James -
Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.
Henry James -
I adore adverbs; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.
Henry James -
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.
Henry James -
She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.
Henry James -
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?
Henry James -
New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.
Henry James -
I think patriotism is like charity — it begins at home.
Henry James -
What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?
Henry James -
To read between the lines was easier than to follow the text.
Henry James -
The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.
Henry James -
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 -
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.
Henry James