Words matter. These are the best Henry James Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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?
To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.
Deep experience is never peaceful.
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.
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.
An Englishman’s never so natural as when he’s holding his tongue.
What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?
A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.
Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
The superiority of one man’s opinion over another’s is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.
Ideas are, in truth, force.
Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
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.
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.
In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.
I adore adverbs; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.
Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.
It’s a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.
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.
It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
However British you may be, I am more British still.
Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
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.
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.
I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.
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 only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
I’ve always been interested in people, but I’ve never liked them.
