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 JAMESAll intimacies are based on differences.
More Henry James Quotes
-
-
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 -
Money’s a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.
HENRY JAMES -
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 JAMES -
And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain.
HENRY JAMES -
Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
HENRY JAMES -
Until you try, you don’t know what you can’t do.
HENRY JAMES -
Excellence does not require perfection.
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 -
He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary.
HENRY JAMES -
Love has nothing to do with good reasons.
HENRY JAMES -
An Englishman’s never so natural as when he’s holding his tongue.
HENRY JAMES -
To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that; this, doubtless, is the right way to live.
HENRY JAMES -
And remember this, that if you’ve been hated, you’ve also been loved.
HENRY JAMES -
In other words summarise intensely and deeply and keep down the lateral development. It should be a little gem of bright, quick, vivid form
HENRY JAMES -
Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
HENRY JAMES