Henry James Quotes

204 Sourced Quotes

He valued life and literature equally for the light they threw upon each other; to his mind one implied the other; he was unable to conceive of them apart.

Henry James
It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to undervalue them.

Henry James
I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.

Henry James
Things are always different than what they might be.... If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.

Henry James
You seemed to me to be soaring far up in the blue - to be sailing in the bright light, over the heads of men. Suddenly some one tosses up a faded rosebud - a missile that should never have reached you - and down you drop to the ground.

Henry James
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

Henry James
She had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.

Henry James
The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.

Henry James
The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

Henry James
He is outside of everything, and an alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

Henry James
My choice is the old world — my choice, my need, my life.

Henry James
What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?

Henry James
The real offense, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his — attached to his own like a small garden plot to a deer park.

Henry James
The black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions.

Henry James
Take the word for it of a man who has made his way inch by inch, and does not believe that we'll wake up to find our work done because we've lain all night a-dreaming of it; anything worth doing is devilish hard to do!

Henry James
The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million…but they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher.

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 don't pretend to know what people are meant for," said Madame Merle. "I only know what I can do with them."

Henry James
She envied Ralph his dying, for if one were thinking of rest that was the most perfect of all. To cease utterly, to give it all up and not know anything more - this idea was as sweet as a vision of a cool bath in a marble tank, in a darkened chamber, in a hot land.... but Isabel recognized, as it passed before her eyes, the quick vague shadow of a long future. She should never escape; she should last to the end.

Henry James
Whatever question there may be of his [Thoreau's] talent, there can be none, I think, of his genius. It was a slim and crooked one; but it was eminently personal. He was imperfect, unfinished, inartistic; he was worse than provincial — he was parochial; it is only at his best that he is readable.

Henry James
"If I should cease to think of you at all for a prescribed time, I should find I could keep it up indefinitely. [...] You know that what you ask is impossible [...] I'm capable of nothing with regard to you," he went on, "but just of being infernally in love with you. If one's strong one loves only the more strongly."

Henry James
He would agree that life is a little worth living — or worth living a little; but would remark that, unfortunately, to live little enough, we have to live a great deal.

Henry James
There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful useless things.

Henry James
Every governmental institution has been a standing testimony to the harmonic destiny of society, a standing proof that the life of man is destined for peace and amity, instead of disorder and contention.

Henry James
The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it-this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education.

Henry James
To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.

Henry James
Little by little, even with other cares, the slowly but surely working poison of the garden-mania begins to stir in my long-sluggish veins.

Henry James
In a play, certainly, the subject is of more importance than in any other work of art. Infelicity, triviality, vagueness of subject, may be outweighed in a poem, a novel, or a picture, by charm of manner, by ingenuity of execution; but in a drama the subject is of the essence of the work-it is the work. If it is feeble, the work can have no force; if it is shapeless, the work must be amorphous.

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
The great merit of the place is that one can arrange one's life here exactly as one pleases...there are facilities for every kind of habit and taste, and everything is accepted and understood.

Henry James