Famous Henry James Quotations

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"Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet."
by Henry James
"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."
by Henry James
"I think patriotism is like charity -- it begins at home."
by Henry James
"In art economy is always beauty."
by Henry James
"Deep experience is never peaceful."
by Henry James
"What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise -- although the philosophers generally call it recognition!"
by Henry James
"Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed."
by Henry James
"Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly."
by Robert Louis Stevenson
"'There are certainly moments,' said Chad, 'when you seem to me too good to be true. Yet if you are true,' he added, 'that seems to be all that need concern me.'"
by Henry James
"A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals."
by Henry James
"Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there."
by Henry James
"Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself."
by 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 airborne particle in its tissue."
by Henry James
"He had the entertainment of thinking that if he had for that moment stopped the clock it was to promote the next minute this still livelier motion."
by Henry James
"He is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease."
by Henry James
"Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty."
by Oscar Wilde
"Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard."
by H. L. Mencken
"Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met."
by William Faulkner
"Henry James created more convincing women than Iris Murdoch put together."
by Wilfred Sheed
"Henry James chews more than he bites off."
by Mrs Henry Adams (c. 1880)
"I feel how little she can like being told of her owing me anything. No woman ever enjoys such an obligation to another woman."
by Henry James
"In spite of overwhelming evidence, it is most difficult for a citizen of western Europe to bring thoroughly home to himself the truth that the civilisation which surrounds him is a rare exception in the history of the world."
by Henry James Sumner Maine
"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 are in a conspiracy to under-value them."
by Henry James
"It struck him really that he had never so lived with her as during this period of her silence; the silence was a sacred hush, a finer clearer medium, in which her idiosyncrasies showed."
by Henry James
"It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition."
by Henry James
"It's time to start living the life you've imagined."
by 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"
by Henry James
"Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty."
by Oscar Wilde
"People can be in general pretty well trusted, of course--with the clock of their freedom ticking as loud as it seems to do here--to keep an eye on the fleeting hour."
by Henry James
"She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table."
by Henry James
"She had fortunately always her appetite for news. The pure flame of the disinterested burned in her cave of treasures as a lamp in a Byzantine vault."
by Henry James
"She had an unequalled gift... of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities."
by Henry James
"Summer afternoon - Summer afternoon... the two most beautiful words in the English language."
by Henry James
"Thanks to his constant habit of shaking the bottle in which life handed him the wine of experience, he presently found the taste of the lees rising as usual into his draught."
by 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."
by 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"
by 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."
by Henry James
"There are three things that are important in human life. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. The third is to be kind."
by Henry James
"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."
by Henry James
"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."
by 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."
by Henry James
"Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea."
by Henry James
"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."
by Henry James
"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."
by 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."
by Henry James
"The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life."
by Henry James
"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."
by 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."
by Henry James
"The fatal futility of Fact."
by Henry James
"The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman."
by Henry James
"In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives."
by Henry James
"Summer afternoon -- summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language."
by Henry James
"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."
by Henry James
"A man who pretends to understand women is ad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals."
by Henry James
"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."
by 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."
by Henry James
"So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!"
by Henry James


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