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
Topics: Conscience
The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.
—Henry James
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing
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
Topics: Happiness, Life, Life and Living
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
Topics: Experience
Summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
—Henry James
Topics: Seasons, Summer
Until you try, you don’t know what you can’t do.
—Henry James
Topics: Trying
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.
—Henry James
Topics: Theater
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
Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
—Henry James
Topics: Ideas, Personality
In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.
—Henry James
Topics: Museums
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
Topics: Criticism, Critics
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
Topics: Civilization
To believe in a child is to believe in the future. Through their aspirations they will save the world. With their combined knowledge the turbulent seas of hate and injustice will be calmed. They will champion the causes of life’s underdogs, forging a society without class discrimination. They will supply humanity with music and beauty as it has never known. They will endure. Towards these ends I pledge my life’s work. I will supply the children with tools and knowledge to overcome the obstacles. I will pass on the wisdom of my years and temper it with patience. I shall impact in each child the desire to fulfill his or her dream. I shall teach.
—Henry James
Topics: Teaching
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
Topics: Arts, Artists, Art
They stood there knowing each other well and each on the whole willing to accept the satisfaction of knowing as a compensation for the inconvenience—whatever it might be—of being known.
—Henry James
Topics: Love
Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
—Henry James
Topics: Travel, Tourism
Greville Fane’s French and Italian were droll; the imitative faculty had been denied her, and she had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities. She knew it, but she didn’t care; correctness was the virtue in the world that, like her heroes and heroines, she valued least.
—Henry James
Topics: Mistakes
Which of you with taking thought can add to his stature one cubit?
—Henry James
Topics: Thoughts
The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.
—Henry James
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing
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.
—Henry James
Topics: Tact
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
Topics: America
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.
—Henry James
Topics: Women, Feminism
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
—Henry James
Topics: Literature, Writing, Books
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
Topics: Appropriateness, Success, Aptness
The terrible fluidity of self-revelation.
—Henry James
Topics: Identity
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
Topics: Exile
It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
—Henry James
Topics: Tradition
An Englishman is never so natural as when he’s holding his tongue.
—Henry James
Topics: Britain
In art economy is always beauty.
—Henry James
Topics: Authors & Writing
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
Topics: Reading, Books
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- T. S. Eliot American-born British Poet
- Nancy Astor, Viscountess Astor British Politician
- Dorothy L. Sayers English Novelist, Playwright
- Phyllis Bottome British Novelist
- Graham Greene British Novelist
- Louis Leo Snyder American-born German Scholar
- Israel Zangwill English Writer, Political Activist
- Dodie Smith American Author
- Langston Hughes American Poet, Writer
- Arnold Bennett British Novelist
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