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 JAMESThings are always different from what they might be.
More Henry James Quotes
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What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?
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Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.
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We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are.
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I take up my own pen again – the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles.
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If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.
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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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A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.
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To myself – today – I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.
HENRY JAMES -
Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
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.
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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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He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary.
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He is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease.
HENRY JAMES -
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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One doesn’t defend one’s god: one’s god is in himself a defense.
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His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.
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It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
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Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else.
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And remember this, that if you’ve been hated, you’ve also been loved.
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Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!
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You are good for nothing unless you are clever.
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Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.
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We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have.
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There’s no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.
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True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one’s self; but the point is not only to get out – you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.
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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