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.
HENRY JAMESSummer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
More Henry James Quotes
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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 -
I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort.
HENRY JAMES -
A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.
HENRY JAMES -
Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better.
HENRY JAMES -
If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.
HENRY JAMES -
The main object of the novel is to represent life. . .
HENRY JAMES -
In art economy is always beauty.
HENRY JAMES -
God’s creature is one. He makes man, not men. His true creature is unitary and infinite, revealing himself, indeed, in every finite form, but compromised by none.
HENRY JAMES -
Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
HENRY JAMES -
He is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease.
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 -
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 -
One doesn’t defend one’s god: one’s god is in himself a defense.
HENRY JAMES -
You must save what you can of your life; you musn’t lose it all simply because you’ve lost a part.
HENRY JAMES -
The superiority of one man’s opinion over another’s is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.
HENRY JAMES