Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Henry James (American-born British Novelist)

Henry James (1843–1916) was an American-born British novelist and short story writer admired as the novel’s most celebrated practitioner.

Born in New York City, James relocated to Europe at age 20, settled in England, took infrequent visits to America, and become a British subject in 1915, a year before his death.

James’s father was a wealthy philosopher and theologian, a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle, who considered the best education was a philosophical and scientific one. Henry and his brother, the future psychologist and philosopher William James, were raised with a broad exposure to civilization and culture.

Henry James was taken abroad before he could even talk. He spent substantial amounts of his childhood overseas and learned with teachers and governesses in London, Paris, Geneva, and Boulogne-Sur-Mer. James’s only exposure to conventional education was his matriculation at the age of 19 at Harvard Law School.

An injury precluded James from participating in the American Civil War. He wrote for over 50 years, creating 20 novels, numerous short stories, 12 plays, and various volumes of travel writing and literary criticism, which he labeled “a supremely beneficent art.”

Scholars categorize James’s literary career into three stages. His early period explored the confrontation between Americans and the delicate and often corrupting effects of European culture. This period produced Roderick Hudson (1876,) The American (1877,) and Daisy Miller (1879,) and peaked with his masterpiece The Portrait of a Lady (1881.) James’s second phase was a period of experimentation and failed attempts to succeed as a dramatist. He produced The Aspern Papers (1888,) The Turn of the Screw (1898,) and his three greatest novels, The Wings of the Dove (1902,) The Ambassadors (1903,) and The Golden Bowl (1904.) James’s final literary phase started with his first voyage to America in 20 years. His pessimistic assessment The American Scene (1907) laments, “The large and noble sanities that I see around are” converted to “crudities, to invalidities, hideous and unashamed.”

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Henry James

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 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
Topics: Carpe-diem

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

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
Topics: Simplicity

The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.
Henry James
Topics: Authors & Writing, Fiction

The fatal futility of Fact.
Henry James
Topics: Facts

In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.
Henry James
Topics: Museums

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

Deep experience is never peaceful.
Henry James
Topics: Experience

Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
Henry James
Topics: Tourism, Travel

True happiness, we are told, consists getting out of one’s self, but the point is not only to get out; you must stay and to stay out, you must have some absorbing errand.
Henry James
Topics: Happiness

What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?
Henry James
Topics: Character

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.
Henry James
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing

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, Art, Artists

Art does not lie in copying nature.—Nature furnishes the material by means of which to express a beauty still unexpressed in nature.—The artist beholds in nature more than she herseif is conscious of.
Henry James
Topics: Art

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

Don’t mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
Henry James
Topics: Judges, Judgment, Mind, Judging

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

I think patriotism is like charity—it begins at home.
Henry James
Topics: Patriotism

Which of you with taking thought can add to his stature one cubit?
Henry James
Topics: Thoughts

I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
Henry James
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writing, Writers

He had dropped upon a seat halfway down the nave and, again in the museum mood, was trying with head thrown back and eyes aloft, to reconstitute a past, to reduce it in fact to the convenient terms of Victor Hugo, whom, a few days before, giving the rein for once in a way to the joy of life, he had purchased in seventy bound volumes, a miracle of cheapness, parted with, he was assured by the shopman, at the price of the red-and-gold alone. He looked, doubtless, while he played his eternal nippers over Gothic glooms, sufficiently rapt in reverence; but what his thought had finally bumped against was the question of where, among packed accumulations, so multiform a wedge would be able to enter..
Henry James
Topics: Reading

An Englishman is never so natural as when he’s holding his tongue.
Henry James
Topics: Britain

Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.
Henry James
Topics: Animals

For myself I live, live intensely and am fed by life, and my value, whatever it be, is in my own kind of expression of that.
Henry James
Topics: Writing

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

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it—this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.
Henry James
Topics: Experience

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
Henry James
Topics: Tradition

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.
Henry James
Topics: America

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