Henry James Quotes
That accurst autobiographic form which puts a premium on the loose, the improvised, the cheap, and the easy.
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.
It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.
Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.
The gardener's rule applies to youth and age: When young 'sow wild oats'; but when old, grow sage.
Law is stable the societies we are speaking of are progressive. The greater or less happiness of a people depends on the degree of promptitude with which the gulf is narrowed.
The Roman Code was merely an enunciation in words of the existing customs of the Roman people.
Cats and monkeys - monkeys and cats - all human life is there!
Live all you can: it's a mistake not to. It doesn't matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?
When I read a novel my imagination starts off at a gallop and leaves the narrator hidden in a cloud of dust I have to come jogging twenty miles back to the denouement.
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, and I know of no substitute for the force and beauty of it's process.
..if I dont do something on the grand scale, it is that my genius is altogether imitative, and that I have nor recently encountered any very striking models of grandeur.
Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints.
I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or to interfere with anything I do.
They had from an early hour made up their mind that society was, luckily, unintelligent, and the margin allowed them by this had fairly become one of their commonplaces.
There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.
Be not afraid of life believe that life is worth living and your belief will create the fact.
The news that Daisy Miller was surrounded by half a dozen wonderful mustaches checked Winterbourne's impulse to go straightway to see her.
He himself was almost never bored, and there was no man with whom it would have been a greater mistake to suppose that silence meant displeasure.
He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of this life than of its privileges and pleasures.
Don't question your conscience so much--it will get out of tune like a strummed piano. Keep it for great occasions.
I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and wrong.
I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favour of doing it.
One never said the things one wanted — one remembered them all an hour afterwards. On the other hand one usually said a lot of things one shouldn't, simply from a sense that one had to say something.
We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generositie.
We must grant the artist his subject his idea his donnee: Our criticisms apply only to what he makes of it.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
The real offence as she ultimately perceived was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his - attached to his own like a small garden plot to a deer park.
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.
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.