Henry James Quotes

It's not my fate to give up--I know it can't be.

I take up my own pen again - the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. To my...

Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak spec...

Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very ...

When you lay down a proposition which is forthwith controverted, it is of course optional with you t...

The ideal of quiet and of genteel retirement, in 1835, was found in Washington Square, where the Doc...

Don’t underestimate the value of irony—it is extremely valuable.

You think too much.''I suppose I do; but I can’t help it, my mind is so terribly active. When I give...

Mrs. Almond lived much farther up town, in an embryonic street with a high number—a region where the...

Some three or four years before this Dr. Sloper had moved his household gods up town, as they say in...

I am not afraid,” she said; which seemed quite presumptuous enough.“You are not afraid of suffering?...

It’s very silly,” she said, “but I go on with it in spite of myself. I’m afraid I’m too easily pleas...

People are free to find out the best and the worst of me!

Nothing irritates me so as the flatness of people’s imagination.

I have heard many a young unmarried lady exclaim with a bold sweep of conception, “Ah me! I wish I w...

When I read a novel my imagination starts off at a gallop and leaves the narrator hidden in a cloud ...

She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of t...

I'm yours for ever--for ever and ever. Here I stand; I'm as firm as a rock. If you'll only trust me,...

She couldn't have told you whether it was because she was afraid, or because such a voice in the dar...

The finer natures were those that shone at the larger times.

She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering.

I don't need the aid of a clever man to teach me how to live. I can find it out for myself.

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

Still, who could say what men ever were looking for? They looked for what they found; they knew what...

It has made me better loving you... it has made me wiser, and easier, and brighter. I used to want a...

One never said the things one wanted — one remembered them all an hour afterwards. On the other hand...

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

I should think that to hear such lovely music as that would really make him feel better."The lady ga...

I never did anything in life to anyone's imagination.

We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our pa...

Cats and monkeys - monkeys and cats - all human life is there!

It comes over me that I had then a strange alter ego deep down somewhere inside me, as the full-blow...

He liked however the open shutters; he opened everywhere those Mrs. Muldoon had closed, closing them...

It seemed to him he had waited an age for some stir of the great grim hush; the life of the town was...

He was a dim secondary social success -- and all with people who had truly not an idea of him. It wa...

It had belonged to that idea of the exasperated consciousness of his victim to become a real test fo...

I know at least what I am,' he simply went on; 'the other side of the medal's clear enough. I've not...

The image of the "presence," whatever it was, waiting there for him to go--this image had not yet be...

Our relation, all round, exists--it's a reality, and a very good one; we're mixed up, so to speak, a...

She had been expecting me and was ready. She gave a long slow soundless headshake, merciful only in ...

They had from an early hour made up their mind that society was, luckily, unintelligent, and the mar...

I never really have believed in the existence of friendship in big societies - in great towns and gr...

That was originally what I had loved him for: that at a period when our native land was nude and cru...

Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchan...

He was holding his breath so as not to inhale the odor of democracy.

I was too much taken up with another interest to care; I felt beneath my feet the threshold of the s...

Try to be someone upon whom nothing is lost!

The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy ... what was talen...

It's time to start living the life you've imagined.

Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the...

The truth is that circumstances had done much to cultivate in Mrs. Tristram a marked tendency to iro...

Nothing is my last word on anything.

I might show it to you, but you'd never see it. The privilege isn't given to every one; it's not env...

Cats and monkeys - monkeys and cats - all human life is there.

The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.

True happiness we are told consists in getting out of one's self. But the point is not only to get...

Live all you can: it's a mistake not to. It doesn't matter what you do in particular, so long as you...

I don't know why we live—the gift of life comes to us from I don't know what source or for what purp...

He was an awkward mixture of strong moral impulse and restless aesthetic curiosity, and yet he would...

..her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a sc...

Take the word for it of a man who has made his way inch by inch, and does not believe that we'll wak...

True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get...

..if I dont do something on the grand scale, it is that my genius is altogether imitative, and that ...

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

He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had been brought up to think much more intently of the...

Let us be vulgar and have some fun, let us invite the President.

Before he went away, he had heard all about the self-made girl, and there was something in the pictu...

He himself was almost never bored, and there was no man with whom it would have been a greater mista...

You will think you take generous views of her; but you will never begin to know through what a stran...

The place suggested a convent with the modern improvements—an asylum in which privacy, though unbrok...

What we often take to be the new is simply the old under some novel form.

She’s the latest freshest fruit of our great American evolution. She’s the self-made girl!(…)Well, t...

Night came on, the lamps were lighted, the tables near him found occupants, and Paris began to wear ...

The historic atmosphere was there, certainly; but the historic atmosphere, scientifically considered...

The news that Daisy Miller was surrounded by half a dozen wonderful mustaches checked Winterbourne's...

I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or to interfere with anything I do.

The great fact all the while however had been the incalculability; since he had supposed himself, fr...

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient lite...

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right th...

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of bei...

We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generositie.

It was grey windless weather, and the bell of the little old church that nestled in the hollow of th...

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance... and I know of no substitute whatever ...

New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.

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

Don't question your conscience so much--it will get out of tune like a strummed piano. Keep it for g...

To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to d...

Be not afraid of life believe that life is worth living and your belief will create the fact.

The young girl inspected her flounces and smoothed her ribbons again; and Winterbourne presently ris...

If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I wou...

It has not been a successful life.''No -- it has only been a beautiful one.

We must grant the artist his subject his idea his donnee: Our criticisms apply only to what he mak...

The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force t...

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

Deep experience is never peaceful.

There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions o...

Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the quest...

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, and I know of no substitute for the for...

Are you using me simply as a vulgar tool? Don't you care for me the least little bit? Let me suggest...

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.