It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
HENRY JAMESI am incapable of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel, I say – feel for all you’re worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live.
More Henry James Quotes
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Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
HENRY JAMES -
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 JAMES -
Young 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.
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I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort.
HENRY JAMES -
An Englishman’s never so natural as when he’s holding his tongue.
HENRY JAMES -
Make the short story tremendously succinct – with a very short pulse or rhythm – and the closest selection of detail.
HENRY JAMES -
The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.
HENRY JAMES -
I mean that everything this afternoon has been too beautiful, and that perhaps everything together will never be so right again. I’m very glad therefore you’ve been a part of it.
HENRY JAMES -
if you are going to be pushed you had better jump
HENRY JAMES -
Don’t try so much to form your character – it’s like trying to pull open a tight, tender young rose.
HENRY JAMES -
Deep experience is never peaceful.
HENRY JAMES -
There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.
HENRY JAMES -
Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day.
HENRY JAMES -
The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.
HENRY JAMES -
You must save what you can of your life; you musn’t lose it all simply because you’ve lost a part.
HENRY JAMES