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 JAMESShe feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.
More Henry James Quotes
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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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You were ground in the very mill of the conventional.
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He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary.
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The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself.
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Things are always different from what they might be.
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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.
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Love has nothing to do with good reasons.
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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.
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I think patriotism is like charity — it begins at home.
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All intimacies are based on differences.
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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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A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.
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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.
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Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.
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I’ve always expected the worst, and it’s always worse than I expected.
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Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.
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…he had long decided that abundant laughter should be the embellishment of the remainder of his days.
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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.
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Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
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You are good for nothing unless you are clever.
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The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.
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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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She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy!
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A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.
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Things are always different than what they might be…If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.
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Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else.
HENRY JAMES