Henry james quotes

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

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

The main object of the novel is to represent life. . .The success of a work of art, to my mind, may be measured by the degree to which it produces a certain illusion; that illusion makes it appear to us for the time that we have lived another life - that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience.

A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.

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.

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.

To believe in a child is to believe in the Future.

If you haven't had your life what have you had?

The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.

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.

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.

The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.

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.

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

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

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.

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern . . . this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.

if you are going to be pushed you had better jump

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

I have in my own fashion learned the lesson that life is effort, unremittingly repeated.

Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better.

Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.

...he had long decided that abundant laughter should be the embellishment of the remainder of his days.

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

There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.

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

It's never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools.

I mean that everything this afternoon has been too beautiful, and that perhaps everything together will never be so right again. I'm very glad therefore you've been a part of it.

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

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

Things are always different from what they might be.

I've always expected the worst, and it's always worse than I expected.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete

If I should certainly say to a novice, 'Write from experience and experience only,' I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, 'Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.'

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.

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

I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.

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.

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.

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

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

If this was love, love had been overrated.

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

Don't pass it by - the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist's that it waits for.

I could come back to America..to die..but never, never to live.

Don’t underestimate the value of irony—it is extremely valuable.

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

If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.

Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation.

Every governmental institution has been a standing testimony to the harmonic destiny of society, a standing proof that the life of man is destined for peace and amity, instead of disorder and contention.

Make the short story tremendously succinct - with a very short pulse or rhythm - and the closest selection of detail - in other words summarise intensely and deeply and keep down the lateral development. It should be a little gem of bright, quick, vivid form

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

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.

He is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease.

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

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

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

You wanted to look at life for yourself - but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional.

There's no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.

Excellence does not require perfection.

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

One doesn't defend one's god: one's god is in himself a defense.

Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.

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.

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.

All roads lead to Rome, and there were times when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground.

One can't judge till one's forty; before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.

Art without life is a poor affair.

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

There were always people to snatch at you, and it would never occur to them that they were eating you up. They did that without tasting.

I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse.

We must for dear life make our own counter-realities.

All the same don't forget that you're young — blessedly young; be glad of it on the contrary and live up to it. 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.

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

No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches no great Universities nor public schools -- no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class -- no Epsom nor Ascot Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American life.

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

Don't try so much to form your character - it's like trying to pull open a tight, tender young rose. Live as you like best and your character will take care of itself.

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

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.

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.

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

In art economy is always beauty.

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

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

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

All intimacies are based on differences.

God's creature is one. He makes man, not men. His true creature is unitary and infinite, revealing himself, indeed, in every finite form, but compromised by none.

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.

I don't care anything about reasons, but I know what I like.

Things are always different than what they might be...If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.

A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.

Keep making the movements of life.

She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.

I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.

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.

To believe in a child is to believe in the future. Through their aspirations they will save the world. With their combined knowledge the turbulent seas of hate and injustice will be calmed.

Deep experience is never peaceful.

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

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

Love has nothing to do with good reasons.

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

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

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

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.

She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.

If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.

You are good for nothing unless you are clever.

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

Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women.

Instead of leading to the high places of happiness, from which the world would seem to lie below one, so that one could look down with a sense of exaltation and advantage, and judge and choose and pity, it led rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and depression, where the sound of other lives, easier and freer, was heard as from above, and served to deepen the feeling of failure.

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.

Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.

The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.

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

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.

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

When you forget to eat, you know you're alive.

It had been agreed between them that lighted candles at wayside inns, in strange countries amid mountain scenery, gave the evening meal a peculiar poetry.

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.

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.

However British you may be, I am more British still.

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

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.

It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent.