I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
HENRY JAMESWe 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.
More Henry James Quotes
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Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.
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We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are.
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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.
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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.
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However British you may be, I am more British still.
HENRY JAMES -
Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.
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One doesn’t defend one’s god: one’s god is in himself a defense.
HENRY JAMES -
One can’t judge till one’s forty; before that we’re too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.
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There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.
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Don’t try so much to form your character – it’s like trying to pull open a tight, tender young rose.
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You were ground in the very mill of the conventional.
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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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Until you try, you don’t know what you can’t do.
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It is no wonder he wins every game. He has never done a thing in his life exept play games
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I call people rich when they’re able to meet the requirements of their imagination.
HENRY JAMES