Henry James Quotes

It is indeed immensely picturesque. I can fancy sitting all a summer's day watching its shadows shorten and lengthen again, and drawing a delicious contrast between the world's duration and the feeble span of individual experience. There is something in Stonehenge almost reassuring; and if you are disposed to feel that life is rather a superficial matter, and that we soon get to the bottom of things, the immemorial gray pillars may serve to remind you of the enormous background of time.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Excellence does not require perfection.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.

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

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

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

Deep experience is never peaceful.

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

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

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

She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.

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.

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

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.

if you are going to be pushed you had better jump

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

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.

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

Life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection, the latter, in search of the hard latent value with which it alone is concerned, sniffs round the mass as instinctively and unerringly as a dog suspicious of some buried bone.

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

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

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.

I had an excellent repast - the best repast possible - which consisted simply of boiled eggs and bread and butter. It was the quality of these simple ingredients that made the occasion memorable. The eggs were so good that I am ashamed to say how many of them I consumed ....It might seem that an egg which has succeeded in being fresh has done all that can be reasonably expected of 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.

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.

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.

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

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

A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see--that’s my idea of happiness.

His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed.

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

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.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete

In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.

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.