Henry James Quotes

“Don't mind anything anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.”

“Don’t underestimate the value of irony—it is extremely valuable.”

“She ordered a cup of tea, which proved excessively bad, and this gave her a sense that she was suffering in a romantic cause.”

“We work in 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.”

“She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.”

“There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.”

“She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering.”

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

“Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”

“It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.”

“If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.”

“Love has nothing to do with good reasons.”

“Besides, I try to judge things for myself; to judge wrong, I think, is more honourable than not to judge at all.”

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

“Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.”

“There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.”

“do you think it is
better to be clever than to be good?”
“Good for what?” asked the Doctor. “You are good for
nothing unless you are clever.”

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

“I'm glad you like adverbs — I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.”

“I don't want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.”

“I'm yours for ever--for ever and ever. Here I stand; I'm as firm as a rock. If you'll only trust me, how little you'll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours.”

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

“I always want to know the things one shouldn't do."
"So as to do them?" asked her aunt.
"So as to choose." said Isabel”

“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?”

“And remember this, that if you've been hated, you've also been loved.”

“Never say you know the last word about any human heart.”

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

“Obstacles are those frightening things you see when you take you eyes off your goal.”

“She is written in a foreign tongue.”

“If this was love, love had been overrated.”

“Things are always different than what they might be… If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.”

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

“Don't pass it by--the immediate, the real, the only, the yours.”

“… and the great advantage of being a literary woman, was that you could go everywhere and do everything.”

“True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get out — you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.”

“Excellence does not require perfection.”

“When I am wicked I am in high spirits.”

“One can't judge till one's forty; before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.”

“You wanted to look at life for yourself — but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional!”

“Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she should find herself in a difficult position, so that she might have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded.”

“To take what there is, and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived — to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that — this doubtless is the right way to live.”

“No, no—there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don’t know what I don’t see—what I don’t fear!”

“Life is a predicament which precedes death.”

“Feel, feel, I say - feel for all you're worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live”

“Deep experience is never peaceful.”

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

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

“The women one meets - what are they but books one has already read? You're a library of the unknown, the uncut. Upon my word I've a subscription.”

“… he had long decided that abundant laughter should be the embellishment of the remainder of his days.”

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

“It was the way the autumn day looked into the high windows as it waned; the way the red light, breaking at the close from under a low sombre sky, reached out in a long shaft and played over old wainscots, old tapestry, old gold, old colour.”

“I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or to interfere with anything I do.”

“She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.”

“A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see--that’s my idea of happiness.”

“She had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.”

“.. her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it.”

“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 undervalue them.”

“It's not my fate to give up--I know it can't be.”

“A second chance—that’s the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in 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.”

“Her memory's your love. You want no other.”

“The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.”