Henry James
123 quotes
Biography
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Live all you can: it's a mistake not to. It doesn't matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?"
"Obstacles are those frightening things you see when you take you eyes off your goal."
"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."
"Life is a predicament which precedes death."
"She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth."
"Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance."
"Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. The third is to be kind."
"[of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones] [it is] like a vast episode in a sermon preached by a grandly humorous divine; and however we may be entertained by the way, we must not forget that our ultimate duty is to be instructed."
"In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons."
"I haven't a creature to talk to...How in Boston, when the evening arrives, and I am tired of reading, and know it would be better to do something else, can I go to the theater? I have tried it, ad nauseam. Likewise calling. Upon whom?""
"Everything about Florence seems to be coloured with a mild violet, like diluted wine."
"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."
"It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe."
"Deep experience is never peaceful."
"Cats and monkeys — monkeys and cats — all human life is there!"
"My choice is the old world — my choice, my need, my life."
"There are bad manners everywhere, but an aristocracy is bad manners organized."
"I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme."
"Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors."
"There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition."