Top 256 Quotes & Sayings by Henry James

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

Deep experience is never peaceful.

In art economy is always beauty.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

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.

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

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

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?

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Love has nothing to do with good reasons.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Excellence does not require perfection.

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.