Henry James Quotes, Sayings, Remarks, Thoughts and Speeches
Henry James Quotes and Sayings
- 1
A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 2
An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 3
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 4
Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 5
Deep experience is never peaceful.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 6
Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 7
Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 8
However British you may be, I am more British still.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 9
I adore adverbs; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 10
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.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 11
I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 12
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.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 13
I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 14
Ideas are, in truth, force.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 15
If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 16
In art economy is always beauty.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 17
In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 18
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance... and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 19
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.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 20
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 21
It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 22
It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 23
Life is a predicament which precedes death.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 24
Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had?
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 25
Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 26
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.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 27
People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 28
Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 29
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.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 30
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 31
The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 32
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?
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 33
The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 34
The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 35
There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 36
There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 37
Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 38
Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 39
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.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 40
To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 41
Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 42
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.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 43
What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
- 44
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.
Henry James | Refcard PDF ↑
