What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?
HENRY JAMESIf this was love, love had been overrated.
More Henry James Quotes
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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.
HENRY JAMES -
I don’t want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.
HENRY JAMES -
Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
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 -
We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are.
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 -
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 -
One doesn’t defend one’s god: one’s god is in himself a defense.
HENRY JAMES -
You were ground in the very mill of the conventional.
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 -
The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.
HENRY JAMES -
It led rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and depression, where the sound of other lives, easier and freer, was heard as from above, and served to deepen the feeling of failure.
HENRY JAMES -
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 JAMES -
I’ve always expected the worst, and it’s always worse than I expected.
HENRY JAMES -
You wanted to look at life for yourself – but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish.
HENRY JAMES -
Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
HENRY JAMES -
However British you may be, I am more British still.
HENRY JAMES -
Deep experience is never peaceful.
HENRY JAMES -
Until you try, you don’t know what you can’t do.
HENRY JAMES -
He is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease.
HENRY JAMES -
We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have.
HENRY JAMES -
It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
HENRY JAMES -
There’s no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.
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And remember this, that if you’ve been hated, you’ve also been loved.
HENRY JAMES -
Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.
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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