Henry James Quotes (119 Quotes)

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 under value them.

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

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.

The fatal futility of Fact.

Experience was to be taken as showing that one might get a five-pound note as one got a light for a cigarette but one had to check the friendly impulse to ask for it in the same way.

I adore adverbs; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.

To treat a ''big'' subject in the intensely summarized fashion demanded by an evening's traffic of the stage when the evening, freely clipped at each end, is reduced to two hours and a half, is a feat of which the difficulty looms large.

Everything about Florence seems to be colored with a mild violet, like diluted wine.

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.

In art economy is always beauty.

They are a highly compelling sector, but their Achilles heal is they're largely dependent on the Bell companies. Line growth is what we look at. And the strike raises another yellow flag in minds of investors.

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

We can have four national championships. That's the plan.

Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

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

The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.

We haven't gone head to head this year, but on paper Penn State looks just as capable as we are to win the championship.

Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.

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.

I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them.

I think I don't regret a single 'excess' of my responsive youth - I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.

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

No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches no great Universities nor public schools no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class no Epsom nor Ascot Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American life.

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.

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

Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all

The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.

The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy... what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be?

One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.

It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.

I think patriotism is like charity -- it begins at home.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

It was as if, at moments, we were perpetually coming into sight of subjects before which we must stop short, turning suddenly out of alleys that we perceived to be blind, closing with a little bang that made us look at each other--for, like all bangs, it was something louder than we had intended--the doors we had indiscreetly opened.

Most of the time they can get the loan, but it's not 100 percent. The owner usually has to come up with 35 to 40 percent of the money.

England always seems to me like a man swimming with his clothes on his head

There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.

We work n the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.

We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donn our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.

Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong beauty enchanting but rare goodness very apt to be weak folly very apt to be defiant wickedness to carry the day imbeciles to be in great places, peolpe of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night we wake up to it again for ever and ever we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.

I am blackly bored when they are at large and at work but somehow I am still more blackly bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them.

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.

Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.

Kidd, turn off the light to spare my blushes.

I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it.

What could the thing that was to happen to him be, after all, but just this thing that had begun to happen Her dying, her death, his consequent solitude - that was what he had figured as the beast in the jungle.

An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue.

In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.