Top 256 Quotes & Sayings by Henry James - Page 3

My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the post-mortem exploiter.

Things are always different than what they might be...If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.

Of course what he most intensely dreams of is being taken out on walks, and the more you are able to indulge him the more will he adore you and the more all the latent beauty of his nature will come out.

If you haven't had your life what have you had?

The deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer...No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind.

do you think it is better to be clever than to be good?” “Good for what?” asked the Doctor. “You are good for nothing unless you are clever.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete

You think too much.' 'I suppose I do; but I can’t help it, my mind is so terribly active. When I give myself, I give myself. I pay the penalty in my headaches, my famous headaches--a perfect circlet of pain! But I carry it as a queen carries her crown.

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

My father ain't in Europe; my father's in a better place than Europe." Winterbourne imagined for a moment that this was the manner in which the child had been taught to intimate that Mr. Miller had been removed to the sphere of celestial reward. But Randolph immediately added, "My father's in Schenectady.

Keep making the movements of life.

All the same don't forget that you're young — blessedly young; be glad of it on the contrary and live up to it. 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.

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.

Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.

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

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.

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.

He was there or was not there: not there if I didn't see him.

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.

To believe in a child is to believe in the future. Through their aspirations they will save the world. With their combined knowledge the turbulent seas of hate and injustice will be calmed.

The black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions.

Any point of view is interesting that is a direct impression of life. You each have an impression colored by your individual conditions; make that into a picture, a picture framed by your own personal wisdom, your glimpse of the American world.

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

Oxford lends sweetness to labour and dignity to leisure.

Writing is not primarily escape, but use.

Art without life is a poor affair.

We must for dear life make our own counter-realities.

It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life.

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.

...the great merit of the place is that one can arrange one's life here exactly as one pleases...there are facilities for every kind of habit and taste, and everything is accepted and understood.

In a play, certainly, the subject is of more importance than in any other work of art. Infelicity, triviality, vagueness of subject, may be outweighed in a poem, a novel, or a picture, by charm of manner, by ingenuity of execution; but in a drama the subject is of the essence of the work-it is the work. If it is feeble, the work can have no force; if it is shapeless, the work must be amorphous.

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

New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.

She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.

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.

The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be . . .

When I am wicked I am in high spirits.

There are women who are for all your 'times of life.' They're the most wonderful sort.

I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.

Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!

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.

All roads lead to Rome, and there were times when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground.

Take the word for it of a man who has made his way inch by inch, and does not believe that we'll wake up to find our work done because we've lain all night a-dreaming of it; anything worth doing is devilish hard to do!

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

I could come back to America..to die..but never, never to live.

One is oneself a fine consequence.

The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.

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

Art requires, above all things, a suppression of self, a subordination of one's self to an idea.

One of my latest sensations was going to Lady Airlie's to hear Browning read his own poems - with the comport of finding that, at least, if you don't understand them, he himself apparently understands them even less. He read them as if he hated them and would like to bite them to pieces.

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.

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.

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.

We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.

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.

The artist beholds in nature more than she herself Nature is conscious of.

In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons.

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.

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

Live as you like best, and your character will take care of itself. Most things are good for you; the exceptions are very rare.