Henry James quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Henry James

Henry James Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Henry James on Wise Famous Quotes.

Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation.

You can do a great many things if you are rich which would be severely criticised if you were poor

What is either a picture or a novel that is not character?

She gazed and wondered, like a child or peasant, and paid her silent tribute to visible grandeur.

She is written in a foreign tongue.

I never did anything in life to anyone's imagination.

Mrs. Penniman always, even in conversation, italicised her personal pronouns.

Americans will eat garbage provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup.

She had a certain way of looking at life which he took as a personal offense.

The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.

There's no generosity without some sacrifice.

And magnificently blue and imperturbably quiet - save for the great regular swell of

The sense of success -the most agreeable emotion of the human heart

I don't talk for your amusement.

The news that Daisy Miller was surrounded by half a dozen wonderful mustaches checked Winterbourne's impulse to go straightway to see her.

- Do you know I love you ?
- I'm sure I don't care whether you do or not !

own devices, that he

Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.

But if we may perish by cracks in things that we don't know -

Wasn't history full of the destruction of precious things?

He knew there were disappointments that lasted as long as life.

When you are embarrassed, do as you think best, and you will do very well. When you are in a difficulty, judge for yourself.

Art without life is a poor affair.

Typical frivolous always ended by sacrificing to vulgar pleasures. She

Try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost.

Her real offense was having a mind of her own.

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

It's never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools.

One should try to be one's own best friend and to give one's self, in this manner, distinguished company.

All intimacies are based on differences.

Observe perpetually!

There's nothing so magnificent - for making others feel you - as to have no imagination.

She has been crying here and going on - she has quite upset me.

She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.

If you haven't had your life what have you had?

New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.

Sea. I was even glad of what I had learned in the afternoon at the office of the company - that at the eleventh

Still, who could say what men ever were looking for? They looked for what they found; they knew what pleased them only when they saw it.

Was after all a rather mature blossom, such as could be plucked from the stem only by a vigorous jerk.

It was the truth, vivid and monstrous, that all the while he had waited the wait was itself his portion.

We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are.

Besides, he was a philosopher; he smoked a good many cigars over his disappointment, and in the
fulness of time he got used to it.

Wherever you go, madam, it will matter little what you carry. You will always carry your goodness.

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

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, and I know of no substitute for the force and beauty of it's process.

The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.

And if I wavered for the instant it was not with what I kept back.

There is no more usual basis of union than a mutual misunderstanding

Anger does not last, that way, for years. But there are other things. Impressions last, when they have been strong.

Cats and monkeys - monkeys and cats - all human life is there!

Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.

Live as you like best, and your character will take care of itself. Most things are good for you; the exceptions are very rare.

She gave an envious thought to the happier lot of men, who are always free to plunge into the healing waters of action.

What young man had ever paraded about that way, without a reason, a maiden in her flower? And

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

My envy's not dangerous; it wouldn't hurt a mouse.

And she really had tones to make justice weep.

We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.

The fatal futility of Fact.

What's a man,' she pursued, 'especially an ambitious one, without a variety of ideas?

He had long decided that abundant laughter should be the embellishment of the remainder of his days.

Nothing irritates me so as the flatness of people's imagination.

finished. I had to tell

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

One's theories, after all, matter little, it is one's humor that is the great thing.

Women never dine alone. When they dine alone they don't dine.

Live all you can; it's a mistake not to.

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

There were always people to snatch at you, and it would never occur to them that they were eating you up. They did that without tasting.

Most English talk is a quadrille in a sentry-box.

Be one on whom nothing is lost.

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

Then again I shifted my eyes-I faced what I had to face.

There may be unselfish natures, there may be disinterested feelings.

was all very interesting." She continued to look at me. "You don't think that," she then simply stated. "What have I to gain

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

... a prudent archer has always a second bowstring

I looked at the place with my heart beating as I had known it to do in the dentist's parlor.

I'll watch with you.

absence was a sign that when it might be a question of gratifying him she had grown used to spare no pains, and I fancied her rummaging in some

One need not be a rabid Anglican to be extremely sensible to the charm of an English country church ...

I thought with joy of the morrow,

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

Always keep a window in the attic open; not just cracked: open.

Whether or no being hopelessly vulgar is being 'bad' is a question for the metaphysicians.

If you are going to be pushed you had better jump

However British you may be, I am more British still.

She had an unequalled gift, usually pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into opportunities.

It's time to start living the life you've imagined.

When Milly smiled it was a public event - when she didn't it was a chapter of history. They

... there was something superior even in his injustice, and absolute in his mistakes.

The real offense, as she ultimately perceived, was in having a mind of her own at all.

She often wondered indeed if she ever had been, or ever could be, intimate with anyone.

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

Until you try, you don't know what you can't do.

We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.

It wouldn't have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.

He was there or was not there: not there if I didn't see him.

every one" was out of town perhaps the servants, in the extravagance of their leisure, were profaning the tables. The heat was insufferable

I don't like it, but I'm a person, thank goodness, who can do what I don't like.