Top 256 Quotes & Sayings by Henry James - Page 2

A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.

Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.

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

if you are going to be pushed you had better jump

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

There's no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.

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

If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.

He is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease.

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.

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.

If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.

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

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

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

The main object of the novel is to represent life. . .The success of a work of art, to my mind, may be measured by the degree to which it produces a certain illusion; that illusion makes it appear to us for the time that we have lived another life - that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience.

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.

When you forget to eat, you know you're alive.

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

I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.

Make the short story tremendously succinct - with a very short pulse or rhythm - and the closest selection of detail - in other words summarise intensely and deeply and keep down the lateral development. It should be a little gem of bright, quick, vivid form

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.

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

I take up my own pen again - the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. To myself - today - I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.

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

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

You are good for nothing unless you are clever.

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

Don't pass it by - the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist's that it waits for.

God's creature is one. He makes man, not men. His true creature is unitary and infinite, revealing himself, indeed, in every finite form, but compromised by none.

Things are always different from what they might be.

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

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.

Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation.

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

She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.

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

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

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

The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.

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.

Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.

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

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

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

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

If this was love, love had been overrated.

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

If I should certainly say to a novice, 'Write from experience and experience only,' I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, 'Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.'

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.

All intimacies are based on differences.

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 mean that everything this afternoon has been too beautiful, and that perhaps everything together will never be so right again. I'm very glad therefore you've been a part of it.

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.

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.

Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.

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

Instead of leading to the high places of happiness, from which the world would seem to lie below one, so that one could look down with a sense of exaltation and advantage, and judge and choose and pity, it led rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and depression, where the sound of other lives, easier and freer, was heard as from above, and served to deepen the feeling of failure.

Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better.