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.
HENRY JAMESLive all you can; it’s a mistake not to.
More Henry James Quotes
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To establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one’s own.
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Instead of leading to the high places of happiness, from which the world would seem to lie below one, so that one could look down with a sense of exaltation and advantage, and judge and choose and pity.
HENRY JAMES -
I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
HENRY JAMES -
There’s no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.
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Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
HENRY JAMES -
I’m yours for ever–for ever and ever. Here I stand; I’m as firm as a rock. If you’ll only trust me, how little you’ll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours.
HENRY JAMES -
You were ground in the very mill of the conventional.
HENRY JAMES -
Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.
HENRY JAMES -
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 hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort.
HENRY JAMES -
An Englishman’s never so natural as when he’s holding his tongue.
HENRY JAMES -
It’s time to start living the life you’ve imagined.
HENRY JAMES -
In art economy is always beauty.
HENRY JAMES -
Don’t pass it by – the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist’s that it waits for.
HENRY JAMES -
What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?
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 -
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 -
A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.
HENRY JAMES -
The main object of the novel is to represent life. . .
HENRY JAMES -
Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.
HENRY JAMES -
The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.
HENRY JAMES -
Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women.
HENRY JAMES -
if you are going to be pushed you had better jump
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Love has nothing to do with good reasons.
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Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better.
HENRY JAMES -
Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.
HENRY JAMES