Quotes by Henry James

Henry James

Henry James

American author

Lived from: 1843 - 1916

Category: Writers (Contemporary) Country: FlagUnited States

  • 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.
  • Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
  • The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.
  • 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.
  • The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.
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Quotes 1 till 20 of 43.

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  • Deep experience is never peaceful.
    ― Henry James
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  • A man who pretends to understand women is ad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.
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  • Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
    ― Henry James
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  • Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.
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  • Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
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  • 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.
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  • 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.
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  • He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.
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  • 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.
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  • 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 favor of doing it.
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  • I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
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  • I think patriotism is like charity - it begins at home.
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  • Ideas are, in truth, force.
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  • 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.
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  • In art economy is always beauty.
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  • In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.
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  • 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.
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  • 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.
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  • It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
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  • 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?
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Questions and Answers

What are the most famous quotes from Henry James?

The two most famous quotes from Henry James are:

  • "Deep experience is never peaceful."
  • "A man who pretends to understand women is ad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals."

When did Henry James live?

Henry James was born in 1843 and died in the year 1916.