We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are.
HENRY JAMESI think patriotism is like charity — it begins at home.
More Henry James Quotes
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Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.
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 -
If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it.
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 -
I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.
HENRY JAMES -
To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession.
HENRY JAMES -
Make the short story tremendously succinct – with a very short pulse or rhythm – and the closest selection of detail.
HENRY JAMES -
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
HENRY JAMES -
What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?
HENRY JAMES -
The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.
HENRY JAMES -
It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
HENRY JAMES -
If you have work to do, don’t wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.
HENRY JAMES -
There’s no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.
HENRY JAMES -
Until you try, you don’t know what you can’t do.
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.
HENRY JAMES