Never say you know the last word about any human heart.
HENRY JAMESYoung men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women.
More Henry James Quotes
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Until you try, you don’t know what you can’t do.
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Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
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And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain.
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One can’t judge till one’s forty; before that we’re too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.
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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.
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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.
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To live in the world of creation-to get into it and stay in it-to frequent it and haunt it…to think intently and fruitfully, to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation-this is the only thing.
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To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession.
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I don’t care anything about reasons, but I know what I like.
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You must save what you can of your life; you musn’t lose it all simply because you’ve lost a part.
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Things are always different than what they might be…If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.
HENRY JAMES -
Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.
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If I should certainly say to a novice, ‘Write from experience and experience only,’ I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.’
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Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better.
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I think patriotism is like charity — it begins at home.
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It’s never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools.
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if you are going to be pushed you had better jump
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If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.
HENRY JAMES -
Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else.
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There’s no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.
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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.
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She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy!
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Make the short story tremendously succinct – with a very short pulse or rhythm – and the closest selection of detail.
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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.
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The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.
HENRY JAMES -
Imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.
HENRY JAMES