Henry James Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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

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 . . .

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

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.

London is on the whole the most possible form of life.

...The peculiar air of Oxford-the air of liberty to care for the things of the mind assured and secured by machinery which is in itself a satisfaction to sense.

I ought to tell you that I'm probably your cousin.

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.

It might seem that an egg which has succeeded in being fresh has done all that can reasonably be expected of it.

I have only to let myself go! So I have said all my life, yet I have never fully done it.

Make him [the reader] think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications.

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?

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.

Life's to short for chess.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

One can't judge till one's forty; before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.

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

All intimacies are based on differences.

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

If this was love, love had been overrated.

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.

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.

...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.

One is oneself a fine consequence.

...and the great advantage of being a literary woman, was that you could go everywhere and do everything.

Experience was to be taken as showing that one might get a five-pound note as one got a light for a cigarette; but one had to check the friendly impulse to ask for it in the same way.

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

..her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it.

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

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

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

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

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

Art without life is a poor affair.

When I am wicked I am in high spirits.

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

Keep making the movements of life.

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

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