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 JAMESI know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.
More Henry James Quotes
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Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.
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 -
A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.
HENRY JAMES -
Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
HENRY JAMES -
Life is a predicament which precedes death.
HENRY JAMES -
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 -
The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself.
HENRY JAMES -
To live in the world of creation-to get into it and stay in it-to frequent it and haunt it…to think intently and fruitfully, to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation-this is the only thing.
HENRY JAMES -
…he had long decided that abundant laughter should be the embellishment of the remainder of his days.
HENRY JAMES -
I’ve always expected the worst, and it’s always worse than I expected.
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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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Deep experience is never peaceful.
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I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
HENRY JAMES -
if you are going to be pushed you had better jump
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One doesn’t defend one’s god: one’s god is in himself a defense.
HENRY JAMES