Henry James Quotes
Henry James Quotes. Below is a collection of famous Henry James quotes. Here you can find the most popular and greatest quotes by Henry James. Share these quotations with your friends and family.
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.
By Henry James
I am blackly bored when they are at large and at work; but somehow I am still more blackly bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them.
By Henry James
A man who pretends to understand women is ad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.
By Henry James
To treat a big subject in the intensely summarized fashion demanded by an evening's traffic of the stage when the evening, freely clipped at each end, is reduced to two hours and a half, is a feat of which the difficulty looms large.
By Henry James
Summer afternoon -- summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
By Henry James
The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.
By Henry James
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.
By Henry James
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.
By Henry James
The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.
By Henry James
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.
By Henry James
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.
By Henry James
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.
By Henry James
Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
By Henry James
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.
By Henry James
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.
By Henry James
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.
By Henry James
There are three things that are important in human life. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. The third is to be kind.
By Henry James
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.
By Henry James
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
By Henry James
The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
By Henry James
Thanks to his constant habit of shaking the bottle in which life handed him the wine of experience, he presently found the taste of the lees rising as usual into his draught.
By Henry James
Summer afternoon - Summer afternoon... the two most beautiful words in the English language.
By Henry James
She had fortunately always her appetite for news. The pure flame of the disinterested burned in her cave of treasures as a lamp in a Byzantine vault.
By Henry James
She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.
By Henry James
People can be in general pretty well trusted, of course--with the clock of their freedom ticking as loud as it seems to do here--to keep an eye on the fleeting hour.
By Henry James
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
By Henry James