Henry James Quotes

204 Sourced Quotes

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
The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be.

Henry James
What he thought of her she knew, what he was capable of saying to her she had felt; yet they were married, for all that, and marriage meant that a woman should cleave to the man with whom, uttering tremendous vows, she had stood at the altar.

Henry James
The warm, the very warm heart of New England at its best, such a vast abounding Arcadia of mountains and broad vales and great rivers and large lakes and white villages embowered in prodigious elms and maples. It is extraordinarily beautiful and graceful and idyllic—for America.
Of Connecticut

Henry James
One can't judge till one's forty; before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.

Henry James
If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?

Henry James
Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness... proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures.

Henry James
So it has come at last—the Distinguished Thing.

Henry James
I always want to know the things one shouldn't do." "So as to do them?" asked her aunt. "So as to choose." said Isabel

Henry James
I don't care anything about reasons, but I know what I like.

Henry James
A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.

Henry James
She had promised him she would consider his question [of marrying him] [...]. But this was not the case; she was wondering if she were not a cold, hard, priggish person, and, on her at last getting up and going rather quickly back to the house, felt, as she had said to her friend, really frightened at herself.

Henry James
However incumbent it may be on most of us to do our duty, there is, in spite of a thousand narrow dogmatisms, nothing in the world that anyone is under the least obligation to like — not even (one braces one's self to risk the declaration) a particular kind of writing.

Henry James
In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.

Henry James
Of course what he most intensely dreams of is being taken out on walks, and the more you are able to indulge him the more will he adore you and the more all the latent beauty of his nature will come out.

Henry James
There are bad manners everywhere, but an aristocracy is bad manners organized.

Henry James
The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant — no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes.

Henry James
So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!

Henry James
I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination.

Henry James
Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.

Henry James
Art requires, above all things, a suppression of self, a subordination of one's self to an idea.

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
Reason is the light of science. Revelation is the light of philosophy.

Henry James
Even medical families cannot escape the more insidious forms of disease...

Henry James
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.

Henry James
London doesn't love the latent or the lurking, has neither time, nor taste, nor sense for anything less discernible than the red flag in front of the steam-roller. It wants cash over the counter and letters ten feet high.

Henry James
My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the post-mortem exploiter.

Henry James
I recall this passage as the hour of its first fully coming over me that she was a beautiful liberal creature. I had seen her personality in glimpses and gleams, like a song sung in snatches, but now it was before me in a large rosy glow, as if it had been a full volume of sound. I heard the whole of the air, and it was sweet fresh music, which I was often to hum over.(Sir Edmund Orme)

Henry James