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 JAMESArt is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.
More Henry James Quotes
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You are good for nothing unless you are clever.
HENRY JAMES -
It’s never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools.
HENRY JAMES -
Don’t pass it by – the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist’s that it waits for.
HENRY JAMES -
To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession.
HENRY JAMES -
Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
HENRY JAMES -
I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.
HENRY JAMES -
Things are always different than what they might be…If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.
HENRY JAMES -
She had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.
HENRY JAMES -
What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?
HENRY JAMES -
Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.
HENRY JAMES -
Life is a predicament which precedes death.
HENRY JAMES -
Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.
HENRY JAMES -
One doesn’t defend one’s god: one’s god is in himself a defense.
HENRY JAMES -
To believe in a child is to believe in the Future.
HENRY JAMES -
I 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.
HENRY JAMES







