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 JAMESMoney’s a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.
More Henry James Quotes
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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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He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary.
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The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.
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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 -
Don’t pass it by – the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist’s that it waits for.
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She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.
HENRY JAMES -
Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.
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Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation.
HENRY JAMES -
Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
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Make the short story tremendously succinct – with a very short pulse or rhythm – and the closest selection of detail.
HENRY JAMES -
I don’t care anything about reasons, but I know what I like.
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And remember this, that if you’ve been hated, you’ve also been loved.
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However British you may be, I am more British still.
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 -
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.
HENRY JAMES -
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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To believe in a child is to believe in the Future.
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When you forget to eat, you know you’re alive.
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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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I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse.
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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.
HENRY JAMES -
The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern . . . this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.
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The main object of the novel is to represent life. . .
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The success of a work of art, to my mind, may be measured by the degree to which it produces a certain illusion; that illusion makes it appear to us for the time that we have lived another life – that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience.
HENRY JAMES -
It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
HENRY JAMES -
Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better.
HENRY JAMES