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 JAMESYou must save what you can of your life; you musn’t lose it all simply because you’ve lost a part.
More Henry James Quotes
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What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?
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I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort.
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I think I don’t regret a single “excess” of my responsive youth I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn’t embrace.
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Live as you like best and your character will take care of itself.
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Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
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If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.
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The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.
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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 -
Don’t pass it by – the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist’s that it waits for.
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It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent.
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Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.
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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.
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.
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She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy!
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Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
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One doesn’t defend one’s god: one’s god is in himself a defense.
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Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!
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The superiority of one man’s opinion over another’s is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.
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I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
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You must save what you can of your life; you musn’t lose it all simply because you’ve lost a part.
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I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.
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The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern . . . this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.
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Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.
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We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are.
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Don’t underestimate the value of irony-it is extremely valuable.
HENRY JAMES -
Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.
HENRY JAMES