Henry James Quotations

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

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.

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

There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

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

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

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.

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

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.

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.

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

On moonless nights, they would hide with lanterns to get boats to ram into barges so they could steal from the ships.

Most of the time they can get the loan, but it's not 100 percent. The owner usually has to come up with 35 to 40 percent of the money.

She is the one who leads the people of Little Egg Harbor to freedom.

We can have four national championships. That's the plan.

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?

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.

What could the thing that was to happen to him be, after all, but just this thing that had begun to happen? Her dying, her death, his consequent solitude - that was what he had figured as the beast in the jungle.

This is a pretty serious-minded farm show. But it has to be when you're pulling the farmer away from the farm.

It was as if, at moments, we were perpetually coming into sight of subjects before which we must stop short, turning suddenly out of alleys that we perceived to be blind, closing with a little bang that made us look at each other--for, like all bangs, it was something louder than we had intended--the doors we had indiscreetly opened.

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

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

Excellence does not require perfection.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

My idea is this, that when you only love a little you’re naturally not jealous-or are only jealous also a little, so that it doesn’t matter. But when you love in a deeper and intenser way, then you’re in the very same proportion jealous; your jealousy has intensity and, no doubt, ferocity. When however you love in the most abysmal and unutterable way of all – whey then you’re beyond everything, and nothing can pull you down.

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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 always want to know the things one shouldn't do." "So as to do them?" asked her aunt. "So as to choose." said Isabel

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

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

If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.

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

...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.

In art economy is always beauty.

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.

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

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.

Deep experience is never peaceful.

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.

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.

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.

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

Writing is not primarily escape, but use.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

If this was love, love had been overrated.

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

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

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

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

Ideas are, in truth, force.

She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.

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

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

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

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.

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.