Don’t try so much to form your character – it’s like trying to pull open a tight, tender young rose.
HENRY JAMESShe is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy!
More Henry James Quotes
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Sorrow comes in great waves…but rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us, it leaves us.
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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 know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.
HENRY JAMES -
If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it.
HENRY JAMES -
It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
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 -
The superiority of one man’s opinion over another’s is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.
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 -
Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.
HENRY JAMES -
One doesn’t defend one’s god: one’s god is in himself a defense.
HENRY JAMES -
His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.
HENRY JAMES -
To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that; this, doubtless, is the right way to live.
HENRY JAMES -
We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are.
HENRY JAMES -
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 JAMES -
Americans will eat garbage provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup.
HENRY JAMES






