Henry James - Mind Quotes

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The deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer...No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind.

Henry James
The effect, if not the prime office, of criticism is to make our absorption and our enjoyment of the things that feed the mind as aware of itself as possible, since that awareness quickens the mental demand, which thus in turn wanders further and further for pasture. This action on the part of the mind practically amounts to a reaching out for the reasons of its interest, as only by its ascertaining them can the interest grow more various. This is the very education of our imaginative life.

Henry James
Europe was best described, to his mind, as an elaborate engine for dissociating the confined American from that indispensable knowledge, and was accordingly only rendered bearable by these occasional stations of relief, traps for the arrest of wandering western airs.

Henry James
Don't mind anything anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

Henry James
You think too much.' 'I suppose I do; but I can't help it, my mind is so terribly active. When I give myself, I give myself. I pay the penalty in my headaches, my famous headaches—a perfect circlet of pain! But I carry it as a queen carries her crown.

Henry James
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
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 peculiar air of Oxford-the air of liberty to care for the things of the mind assured and secured by machinery which is in itself a satisfaction to sense.

Henry James
The main object of the novel is to represent life...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.

Henry James
It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.

Henry James