Top 500 Henry James Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better.”

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

153. “If we pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify.”

— Henry James

154. “You’re a very nice girl, but I wish you’d flirt with me, and me only.”

— Henry James

155. “The black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions.”

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

157. “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

158. “Autobiography may be the preeminent kind of American expression.”

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

160. “There are women who are for all your ‘times of life.’ They’re the most wonderful sort.”

— Henry James

161. “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

162. “I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.”

— Henry James

163. “The peril for you is that you live too much in the world of your own dreams. You’re not enough in contact with reality – with the toiling, striving, suffering, I may even say sinning, world that surrounds you. You’re too fastidious; you’ve too many graceful illusions.”

— Henry James

164. “The artist beholds in nature more than she herself Nature is conscious of.”

— Henry James

165. “There was nothing in the room the next minute but the sunshine and a sense that I must stay.”

— Henry James

166. “He was absolutely, on this occasion, a living, detestable, dangerous presence.”

— Henry James

167. “The flash of this knowledge – for it was knowledge in the midst of dread – produced in me the most extraordinary effect.”

— Henry James

168. “We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are.”

— Henry James

169. “People can be in general pretty well trusted, of course – with the clock of their freedom ticking as loud as it seems to do here – to keep an eye on the fleeting hour.”

— Henry James

170. “A solitary maple on a woodside flames in single scarlet, recalls nothing so much as the daughter of a noble house dressed for a fancy ball, with the whole family gathered around to admire her before she goes.”

— Henry James

171. “I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.”

— Henry James

172. “You seemed to me to be soaring far up in the blue – to be sailing in the bright light, over the heads of men. Suddenly some one tosses up a faded rosebud – a missile that should never have reached you – and down you drop to the ground.”

— Henry James

173. “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.”

— Henry James

174. “Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation.”

— Henry James

175. “To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one’s own.”

— Henry James

176. “I have only to let myself go! So I have said all my life, yet I have never fully done it.”

— Henry James

177. “Europe was best described, to his mind, as an elaborate engine for dissociating the confined American from that indispensable knowledge, and was accordingly only rendered bearable by these occasional stations of relief, traps for the arrest of wandering western airs.”

— Henry James

178. “What is character but the determination of incident?”

— Henry James

179. “She was a coquette; he was sure she had a spirit of her own; but in her bright, sweet, superficial little visage there was no mockery, no irony. Before long it became obvious that she was much disposed towards conversation.”

— Henry James

180. “To treat a big subject in the intensely summarized fashion demanded by an evening’s traffic of the stage when the evening, freely clipped at each end, is reduced to two hours and a half, is a feat of which the difficulty looms large.”

— Henry James

181. “She had her own way of doing all that she did, and this is the simplest description of a character which, although by no means without liberal motions, rarely succeeded in giving an impression of suavity.”

— Henry James

182. “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.”

— Henry James

183. “I call it relief, though it was only the relief that a snap brings to a strain or the burst of a thunderstorm to a day of suffocation. It was at least change, and it came with a rush.”

— Henry James

184. “From five o’clock to eight is on certain occasions a little eternity; but on such an occasion as this the interval could be only an eternity of pleasure.”

— Henry James

185. “I had not gone to bed; I sat reading by a couple of candles. There was a roomful of old books at Bly – last-century fiction, some of it, which, to the extent of a distinctly deprecated renown, but never to so much as that of a stray specimen, had reached the sequestered home and appealed to the unavowed curiosity of my youth.”

— Henry James

186. “Now that she was in the secret, now that she knew something that so much concerned her and the eclipse of which had made life resemble an attempt to play whilst with an imperfect pack of cards, the truth of things, their mutual relations, their meaning, and for the most part their horror, rose before her with a kind of architectural vastness.”

— Henry James

187. “Oh,” said Catherine, with some eagerness, “it doesn’t take long to like a person – when once you begin.”

— Henry James

188. “It was not that I didn’t wait, on this occasion, for more, for I was rooted as deeply as I was shaken. Was there a “secret” at Bly – a mystery of Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement?”

— Henry James

189. “I reflected acutely that the sense of such differences, such superiorities of quality, always, on the part of the majority – which could include even stupid, sordid headmasters – turn infallibly to the vindictive.”

— Henry James

190. “Ideas are, in truth, force.”

— Henry James

191. “This was the sound he cherished when alone in the stillness of his rooms. He sought and guarded the stillness, so that it might prevail there till the inevitable sounds of life, once more, comparatively coarse and harsh, should smother and deaden it – doubtless by the same process with which they would officiously heal the ache in his soul that was somehow one with it.”

— Henry James

192. “His egotism lay like a serpent in a bank of flowers.”

— Henry James

193. “Even iron sometimes melts.”

— Henry James

194. “He had gone in late to see her, but evening hadn’t settled and she was presented to him in that long fresh light of waning April days which affects us often with a sadness sharper than the greyest hours of autumn.”

— Henry James

195. “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.”

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

197. “Take the word for it of a man who has made his way inch by inch, and does not believe that we’ll wake up to find our work done because we’ve lain all night a-dreaming of it; anything worth doing is devilish hard to do!”

— Henry James

198. “My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the post-mortem exploiter.”

— Henry James

199. “It’s never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools.”

— Henry James

200. “Was he in love with Gilbert Osmond’s wife, and if so what comfort did he expect to derive from it? If he was in love with Pansy he was not in love with her stepmother, and if he was in love with her stepmother he was not in love with Pansy. Was she to cultivate the advantage she possessed in order to make him commit himself to Pansy, knowing he would do so for her sake and not for the small creature’s own was this the service her husband had asked of her?”

— Henry James