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.

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

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.

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

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.

The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.

She had her own way of doing all that she did, and this is the simplest description of a character which, although by no means without liberal motions, rarely succeeded in giving an impression of suavity.

I recall this passage as the hour of its first fully coming over me that she was a beautiful liberal creature. I had seen her personality in glimpses and gleams, like a song sung in snatches, but now it was before me in a large rosy glow, as if it had been a full volume of sound. I heard the whole of the air, and it was sweet fresh music, which I was often to hum over.(Sir Edmund Orme)

The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the Anglo-Saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big bayad?re of journalism, of the newspaper and the picture magazine which keeps screaming, "Look at me." Illustrations, loud simplifications... bill poster advertising ? only these stand a chance.

To say that she had a book is to say that her solitude did not press upon her; for her love of knowledge had a fertilizing quality and her imagination was strong. There was at this time, however, a want of lightness in her situation, which the arrival of an unexpected visitor did much to dispel.

The image of the presence, whatever it was, waiting there for him to go -this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he stopped short of the point at which certainty would have come to him. For, with all his resolution, or more exactly with all his dread, he did stop short - he hung back from really seeing. The risk was too great and his fear too definite: it took at this moment an awful specific form.

She is written in a foreign tongue.

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it-this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education.

Oxford lends sweetness to labour and dignity to leisure.

...The peculiar air of Oxford-the air of liberty to care for the things of the mind assured and secured by machinery which is in itself a satisfaction to sense.

She carried within herself a great fund of life, and her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movement of her own heart and the agitations of the world. For this reason, she was fond of seeing great crowds, and large stretches of country, of reading about revolutions and wars, of looking at historical pictures--a class of efforts to which she had often gone so far as to forgive much bad painting for the sake of the subject.

It is altogether an extraordinary growing, swarming, glittering, pushing, chattering, good-natured, cosmopolitan place, and perhaps in some ways the best imitation of Paris that can be found (with a great originality of its own).

New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.

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

Experience was to be taken as showing that one might get a five-pound note as one got a light for a cigarette; but one had to check the friendly impulse to ask for it in the same way.

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

The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality.

No themes are so human as those that reflect for us, out of the confusion of life, the close connection of bliss and bale, of the things that help with the things that hurt, so dangling before us forever that bright hard medal, of so strange an alloy, one face of which is somebody's right and ease and the other somebody's pain and wrong.

The effect, if not the prime office, of criticism is to make our absorption and our enjoyment of the things that feed the mind as aware of itself as possible, since that awareness quickens the mental demand, which thus in turn wanders further and further for pasture. This action on the part of the mind practically amounts to a reaching out for the reasons of its interest, as only by its ascertaining them can the interest grow more various. This is the very education of our imaginative life.

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.

The practice of "reviewing"... in general has nothing in common with the art of criticism.

Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions.

I have only to let myself go! So I have said all my life, yet I have never fully done it.

Art is a point of view, and a genius way of looking at things.

England always seems to me like a man swimming with his clothes on his head.

Kidd, turn off the light to spare my blushes.

[Thomas Henry] Huxley is a very genial, comfortable being-yet with none of the noisy and windy geniality of some folks here, whom you find with their backs turned when you are responding to the remarks that they have made you.

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

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.

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.

The women one meets - what are they but books one has already read? You're a library of the unknown, the uncut. Upon my word I've a subscription.

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

I don't care about anything but you, and that's enough for the present. I want you to be happy--not to think of anything sad; only to feel that I'm near you and I love you. Why should there be pain? In such hours as this what have we to do with pain? That's not the deepest thing; there's something deeper.

She envied Ralph his dying, for if one were thinking of rest that was the most perfect of all. To cease utterly, to give it all up and not know anything more - this idea was as sweet as a vision of a cool bath in a marble tank, in a darkened chamber, in a hot land. ... but Isabel recognized, as it passed before her eyes, the quick vague shadow of a long future. She should never escape; she should last to the end.

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

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

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

You seemed to me to be soaring far up in the blue - to be sailing in the bright light, over the heads of men. Suddenly some one tosses up a faded rosebud - a missile that should never have reached you - and down you drop to the ground.

...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...

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

Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of 'liking' a work of art or not liking it; the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test.

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.

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.

I ought to tell you I'm probably your cousin.

Her memory's your love. You want no other.

Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation.

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance.

I don’t think I pity her. She doesn’t strike me as a girl that suggests compassion. I think I envy her... I don’t know whether she is a gifted being, but she is a clever girl, with a strong will and a high temper. She has no idea of being bored...Very pretty indeed; but I don’t insist upon that. It’s her general air of being someone in particular that strikes me.

Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she should find herself in a difficult position, so that she might have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded.

Her chief dread in life, at this period of her development, was that she would appear narrow minded; what she feared next afterwards was that she should be so.

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

...and the great advantage of being a literary woman, was that you could go everywhere and do everything.

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