We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art…what we are talking about and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered.
HENRY JAMESTo take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that; this, doubtless, is the right way to live.
More Henry James Quotes
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She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.
HENRY JAMES -
Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!
HENRY JAMES -
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.
HENRY JAMES -
A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.
HENRY JAMES -
God’s creature is one. He makes man, not men. His true creature is unitary and infinite, revealing himself, indeed, in every finite form, but compromised by none.
HENRY JAMES -
One doesn’t defend one’s god: one’s god is in himself a defense.
HENRY JAMES -
I think I don’t regret a single “excess” of my responsive youth I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn’t embrace.
HENRY JAMES -
A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.
HENRY JAMES -
Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
HENRY JAMES -
I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.
HENRY JAMES -
Americans will eat garbage provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup.
HENRY JAMES -
Instead of leading to the high places of happiness, from which the world would seem to lie below one, so that one could look down with a sense of exaltation and advantage, and judge and choose and pity.
HENRY JAMES -
I call people rich when they’re able to meet the requirements of their imagination.
HENRY JAMES -
The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.
HENRY JAMES -
Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better.
HENRY JAMES