Top 500 Henry James Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Anger does not last, that way, for years. But there are other things. Impressions last, when they have been strong.”

— Henry James

252. “The chance had come – it was an extraordinary one – on the day she first met Densher; and it was to the girl’s lasting honour that she knew on the spot what she was in the presence of.”

— Henry James

253. “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

254. “May Bartram smiled. “I don’t pretend it exactly shows that I’m not living for you. It’s my intimacy with you that’s in question.” He laughed as he saw what she meant. “Yes, but since, as you say, I’m only, so far as people make out, ordinary, you’re – aren’t you? no more than ordinary either. You help me to pass for a man like another. So if I am, as I understand you, you’re not compromised. Is that it?”

— Henry James

255. “She believed me, I was sure, absolutely; if she hadn’t I don’t know what would have become of me, for I couldn’t have borne the strain alone.”

— Henry James

256. “She had always observed that she got on better with clever women than silly ones like herself; the silly ones could never understand her wisdom; whereas the clever ones – the really clever ones – always understood her silliness.”

— Henry James

257. “He had seen the follies of the romantic disposition, but there seemed somehow no follies in theirs – nothing, one was obliged to recognise, but innocent pleasures, pleasures without penalties.”

— Henry James

258. “It had been agreed between them that lighted candles at wayside inns, in strange countries amid mountain scenery, gave the evening meal a peculiar poetry.”

— Henry James

259. “Things are always different from what they might be.”

— Henry James

260. “An Englishman’s never so natural as when he’s holding his tongue.”

— Henry James

261. “Oh, it was a trap – not designed but deep – to my imagination, to my delicacy, perhaps to my vanity; to whatever in me was most excitable.”

— Henry James

262. “It must be added however that, thanks to his constant habit of shaking the bottle in which life handed him the wine of experience, he presently found the taste of the lees rising as usual into his draught.”

— Henry James

263. “What there was no effective record of indeed was the small strange pathos on the child’s part of an innocence so saturated with knowledge and so directed to diplomacy.”

— Henry James

264. “When you forget to eat, you know you’re alive.”

— Henry James

265. “There came suddenly an hour after which, as I look back, the business seems to me to have been all pure suffering.”

— Henry James

266. “He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of this life than of its privileges and pleasures.”

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

268. “I keep a band of music in my ante-room,” he said once to her. “It has orders to play without stopping; it renders me two excellent services. It keeps the sounds of the world from reaching the private apartments, and it makes the world think that dancing’s going on within.”

— Henry James

269. “THEY have the manners to be silent, and you, trusted as you are, the baseness to speak!”

— Henry James

270. “One never said the things one wanted – one remembered them all an hour afterwards. On the other hand one usually said a lot of things one shouldn’t, simply from a sense that one had to say something.”

— Henry James

271. “When the possibilities themselves had accordingly turned stale, when the secret of the gods had grown faint, had perhaps even quite evaporated, that, and that only, was failure. It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.”

— Henry James

272. “He himself was almost never bored, and there was no man with whom it would have been a greater mistake to suppose that silence meant displeasure.”

— Henry James

273. “But if we may perish by cracks in things that we don’t know.”

— Henry James

274. “I welcomed the consciousness that I was charged with much to do, and I caused it to be known as well that, left thus to myself, I was quite remarkably firm.”

— Henry James

275. “His full parenthesis was closed, and he was once more but a sentence, of a sort, in the general text, the text that, from his momentary street-corner, showed as a great grey page of print that somehow managed to be crowded without being ‘fine’.”

— Henry James

276. “The girl had a certain nobleness of imagination, which rendered her a good many services and played her a great many tricks.”

— Henry James

277. “I’ll piously gather up the crumbs of your feasts and make a meal of them,” said Nora. “I’ll let you know how they taste.”

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

279. “I don’t know why – there are no brick gables,′ said Mrs. Prest, ’but this corner has seemed to me before more Dutch than Italian, more like Amsterdam than Venice. It’s perversely clean, for reasons of its own; and though you can pass on foot scarcely anyone ever thinks of doing so. It has the air of a Protestant Sunday. Perhaps the people are afraid of the Misses Bordereau. I daresay they have the reputation of witches.”

— Henry James

280. “Every governmental institution has been a standing testimony to the harmonic destiny of society, a standing proof that the life of man is destined for peace and amity, instead of disorder and contention.”

— Henry James

281. “He would rather seem stupid any day than fatuous.”

— Henry James

282. “I find that I really hang back; but I must take my horrid plunge.”

— Henry James

283. “But James, as an artist, was deeply suspicious of what gave him pleasure, or indeed satisfaction. In his own complex sensibility, there was an ambiguity about most things, and this moved him towards subtlety when he approached character, drama, and scene, and nudged him towards many modifying subclauses when he wrote a sentence. Nothing came to him simply.”

— Henry James

284. “But he didn’t, it happened, know the Munsters well enough to give the case much of a lift; so that they were left together as if over the mere laid table of conversation.”

— Henry James

285. “He was holding his breath so as not to inhale the odor of democracy.”

— Henry James

286. “One is oneself a fine consequence.”

— Henry James

287. “The young girl inspected her flounces and smoothed her ribbons again; and Winterbourne presently risked an observation upon the beauty of the view. He was ceasing to be embarrassed, for he had begun to perceive that she was not in the least embarrassed herself.”

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

289. “It might seem that an egg which has succeeded in being fresh has done all that can reasonably be expected of it.”

— Henry James

290. “They had built strong and piled high – based as it was on such appearances – their conviction that, thanks to her native complacencies of so many sorts, she would always, quite to the end and through and through, take them as nobly sparing her. Amerigo.”

— Henry James

291. “In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons.”

— Henry James

292. “People are free to find out the best and the worst of me!”

— Henry James

293. “Before me and beside me sat a row of the comeliest young men, clad in black gowns and wearing on their shoulders long hoods trimmed in white fur. Who and what they were I know not, for I preferred not to learn, lest by chance they should not be so mediaeval as they looked.”

— Henry James

294. “Art is long. If we work for ourselves of course we must hurry. If we work for her we must often pause.”

— Henry James

295. “Experience was to be taken as showing that one might get a five-pound note as one got a light for a cigarette; but one had to check the friendly impulse to ask for it in the same way.”

— Henry James

296. “I never was what I should be.”

— Henry James

297. “We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have.”

— Henry James

298. “The day lingered and the last calls of the last birds sounded, in a flushed sky, from the old trees.”

— Henry James

299. “The infirmity of art was the candour of affection, the grossness of pedigree the refinement of sympathy; the ugliest object in fact as a general thing were the bravest, the tenderest mementoes, and, as such, figured in glass cases apart, worthy doubtless of the home but not worthy of the temple – dedicated to the grimacing, not to the clear-faced gods. She.”

— Henry James

300. “Wasn’t history full of the destruction of precious things?”

— Henry James