Henry James: Quotes about life

Source: The Ambassadors (1903), book V, ch. II.
Context: 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?.. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that... The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.. Live!

Life

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

Henry James

William James, "Is Life Worth Living?," The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897).
Misattributed

Depressing , Inspirational , For Men , Life

“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!”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

Source: The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Ch. LIV.

Life

“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.”

Henry James

Letter to H.G. Wells (10 July 1915).

Life , Beauty , Art

“Life is a predicament which precedes death.”

Henry James

Life , Death

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

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

Source: The Portrait of a Lady

Life , Way , Personality

“The effect, if not the prime office, of criticism is to make our absorption and our enjoyment of the things that feed the mind as aware of itself as possible, since that awareness quickens the mental demand, which thus in turn wanders further and further for pasture. This action on the part of the mind practically amounts to a reaching out for the reasons of its interest, as only by its ascertaining them can the interest grow more various. This is the very education of our imaginative life.”

Henry James

The New Novel (1914).

Life , Education , Imagination , Parting

“Life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection, the latter, in search of the hard latent value with which it alone is concerned, sniffs round the mass as instinctively and unerringly as a dog suspicious of some buried bone.”

Henry James book The Spoils of Poynton

The Spoils of Poynton.
Prefaces (1907-1909)

Life , Dogs , Art , Search

“Cats and monkeys — monkeys and cats — all human life is there!”

Henry James

The Madonna of the Future http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2460/2460-h/2460-h.htm (1879)
The Atlantic Monthly, March 1873 http://books.google.com/books?id=T4cGAQAAIAAJ&q=%22Cats+and+monkeys+monkeys+and+cats+all+human+life+is+there%22&pg=PA293#v=onepage

Life , Cats

“The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication 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, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, "Write from experience, and experience only," I should feel that this was a rather tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, "Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!"”

Henry James

The Art of Fiction http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/artfiction.html (1884)

Life , People , Education , Way

“No themes are so human as those that reflect for us, out of the confusion of life, the close connection of bliss and bale, of the things that help with the things that hurt, so dangling before us forever that bright hard medal, of so strange an alloy, one face of which is somebody's right and ease and the other somebody's pain and wrong.”

Henry James book What Maisie Knew

What Maisie Knew.
Prefaces (1907-1909)

Life , Pain , Help , Hurt

“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 book Hawthorne

Hawthorne, ch. II: Early Manhood.

Life , Country

“He would agree that life is a little worth living — or worth living a little; but would remark that, unfortunately, to live little enough, we have to live a great deal.”

Henry James book Hawthorne

Hawthorne, ch. V: The Three American Novels.

Life

“Life's too short for chess.”

Henry James

Henry James Byron, Our Boys (1875), Act I
Misattributed

Life

“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

Said to Hamlin Garland in 1906 and quoted by Garland in Roadside Meetings (1930; reprinted by Kessinger Publishing, 2005, ISBN 1-417-90788-6, ch. XXXVI: Henry James at Rye (p. 461).

Life