Top 500 Henry James Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “London doesn’t love the latent or the lurking, has neither time, nor taste, nor sense for anything less discernible than the red flag in front of the steam-roller. It wants cash over the counter and letters ten feet high.”

— Henry James

102. “We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.”

— Henry James

103. “Art without life is a poor affair.”

— Henry James

104. “His serenity was but the array of wild flowers niched in his ruin.”

— Henry James

105. “The more you know the more unhappy you are.”

— Henry James

106. “Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of ‘liking’ a work of art or not liking it; the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test.”

— Henry James

107. “The golden bowl – as it was to have been.’ And Maggie dwelt musingly on this obscured figure. ‘The bowl with all our happiness in it. The bowl without the crack.”

— Henry James

108. “I have in my own fashion learned the lesson that life is effort, unremittingly repeated.”

— Henry James

109. “There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful useless things.”

— Henry James

110. “Don’t pass it by – the immediate, the real, the only, the yours.”

— Henry James

111. “The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.”

— Henry James

112. “An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object of fear to a young woman privately bred.”

— Henry James

113. “Oxford lends sweetness to labour and dignity to leisure.”

— Henry James

114. “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

115. “Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions.”

— Henry James

116. “Women never dine alone. When they dine alone they don’t dine.”

— Henry James

117. “Most English talk is a quadrille in a sentry-box.”

— Henry James

118. “There’s no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.”

— Henry James

119. “Don’t try so much to form your character – it’s like trying to pull open a tight, tender young rose. Live as you like best and your character will take care of itself.”

— Henry James

120. “The terrace and the whole place, the lawn and the garden beyond it, all I could see of the park, were empty with a great emptiness.”

— Henry James

121. “I had the view of a castle of romance inhabited by a rosy spirit, such a place as would somehow, for diversion of the young idea, take all colour out of story-books and fairy-tales. Was n’t it just a story-book over which I had fallen a-doze and a-dream?”

— Henry James

122. “I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his perhaps being innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on earth was I?”

— Henry James

123. “The historic atmosphere was there, certainly; but the historic atmosphere, scientifically considered, was no better than a villainous miasma.”

— Henry James

124. “She is written in a foreign tongue.”

— Henry James

125. “I adore adverbs; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.”

— Henry James

126. “Kidd, turn off the light to spare my blushes.”

— Henry James

127. “There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.”

— Henry James

128. “I don’t do it!” I sobbed in despair; “I don’t save or shield them! It’s far worse than I dreamed – they’re lost!” VIII.”

— Henry James

129. “It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.”

— Henry James

130. “Any point of view is interesting that is a direct impression of life. You each have an impression colored by your individual conditions; make that into a picture, a picture framed by your own personal wisdom, your glimpse of the American world.”

— Henry James

131. “She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.”

— Henry James

132. “It is no wonder he wins every game. He has never done a thing in his life exept play games.”

— Henry James

133. “If Quint – on your remonstrance at the time you speak of – was a base menial, one of the things Miles said to you, I find myself guessing, was that you were another.”

— Henry James

134. “We must for dear life make our own counter-realities.”

— Henry James

135. “I adore a moat,’ said Isabel. ‘Good-bye.”

— Henry James

136. “There were always people to snatch at you, and it would never occur to them that they were eating you up. They did that without tasting.”

— Henry James

137. “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

138. “Experience is never limited, and it is never complete.”

— Henry James

139. “The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant – no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes.”

— Henry James

140. “Well,” said Winterbourne, “when you deal with natives you must go by the custom of the place. Flirting is a purely American custom; it doesn’t exist here. So when you show yourself in public with Mr. Giovanelli, and without your mother – ” “Gracious!”

— Henry James

141. “The whole of anything, is never told.”

— Henry James

142. “Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better.”

— Henry James

143. “God’s creature is one. He makes man, not men. His true creature is unitary and infinite, revealing himself, indeed, in every finite form, but compromised by none.”

— Henry James

144. “I don’t care anything about reasons, but I know what I like.”

— Henry James

145. “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

146. “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

147. “The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself.”

— Henry James

148. “It was the first time, in a manner, that I had known space and air and freedom, all the music of summer and all the mystery of nature.”

— Henry James

149. “I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.”

— Henry James

150. “The summer had turned, the summer had gone; the autumn had dropped upon Bly and had blown out half our lights. The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theater after the performance – all strewn with crumpled playbills.”

— Henry James