Top 500 Henry James Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “The women one meets – what are they but books one has already read? You’re a library of the unknown, the uncut. Upon my word I’ve a subscription.”

— Henry James

302. “Whether or no being hopelessly vulgar is being ‘bad’ is a question for the metaphysicians.”

— Henry James

303. “Between nine and ten, at last, in the high clear picture – he was moving in these days, as in a gallery, from clever canvas to clever canvas – he drew a long breath: it was so presented to him from the first that the spell of his luxury wouldn’t be broken.”

— Henry James

304. “I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.”

— Henry James

305. “There’s no way to do that, Miss Archer. I won’t say that if you refuse me you’ll kill me; I shall not die of it. But I shall do worse; I shall live to no purpose.”

— Henry James

306. “All these people – the people of the English mother’s side – had been of condition more or less eminent; yet with oddities and disparities that had often since made Maria, thinking them over, wonder what they really quite rhymed to.”

— Henry James

307. “I suspect that the age of letters is waning, for our time. It is the age of Panama Canals, of Sandra Bernhardt, of Western wheat raising, of merely material expansion. Art, form, may return, but I doubt I shall live to see them – I don’t believe they are as eternal as the poets say.”

— Henry James

308. “One’s theories, after all, matter little, it is one’s humor that is the great thing.”

— Henry James

309. “Every one asks me what I ‘think’ of everything,” said Spencer Brydon; “and I make answer as I can – begging or dodging the question, putting them off with any nonsense. It wouldn’t matter to any of them really,” he went on, “for, even were it possible to meet in that stand-and-deliver way so silly a demand on so big a subject, my ‘thoughts’ would still be almost altogether about something that concerns only myself.”

— Henry James

310. “Poor Catherine’s dignity was not aggressive; it never sat in state; but if you pushed far enough you could find it. Her father had pushed very far.”

— Henry James

311. “It is very wrong to make love to a woman who is engaged, but it is very wrong not to make love to a woman who is married.”

— Henry James

312. “It was all there, in short – it was what he wanted: it was Tremont Street, it was France, it was Lambinet. Moreover, he was freely walking about in it.”

— Henry James

313. “It all left her, as she wandered off, with the strangest of impressions – the sense, forced upon her as never yet, of an appeal, a positive confidence, from the four pairs of eyes, that was deeper than any negation and that seemed to speak on the part of each for some relation to be contrived by her, a relation with herself, which would spare the individual the danger, the actual present strain, of the relation with the others. They.”

— Henry James

314. “The element of the unnamed and untouched became, between us, greater than any other.”

— Henry James

315. “The mere sense of his grasp in her own covered the ground of loss just as much as the ground of gain. His presence was like an object brought so close to her face that she couldn’t see round its edges.”

— Henry James

316. “Charlotte was in pain, Charlotte was in torment, but he himself had given her reason enough for that; and, in respect to the rest of the whole matter of her obligation to follow her husband, that personage and she, Maggie, had so shuffled away every link between consequence and cause that the intention remained, like some famous poetic line in a dead language subject to varieties of interpretation. What.”

— Henry James

317. “Which of you with taking thought can add to his stature one cubit?”

— Henry James

318. “It had come back to him simply that what he had been looking at all summer was a very rich and beautiful world, and that it had not all been made by sharp railroad men and stock-brokers.”

— Henry James

319. “I want to see what life makes of you. One thing is certain – it can’t spoil you. It may pull you about horribly, but I defy it to break you up.”

— Henry James

320. “He envied Miss Barrace at any rate her power of not being. She seemed, with little cries and protests and quick recognitions, movements like the darts of some fine high-feathered free-pecking bird, to stand before life as before some full shop-window. You could fairly hear, as she selected and pointed, the tap of her tortoise-shell against the glass.”

— Henry James

321. “Though it might have its momentary alarms, paternity is not an exciting vocation.”

— Henry James

322. “It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to under value them.”

— Henry James

323. “We know too much about people in these days; we hear too much. Our ears, our minds, our mouths, are stuffed with personalities. Don’t mind anything anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.”

— Henry James

324. “And it was in the mitigated midnight of these approximations that she had discerned the promise of her dawn.”

— Henry James

325. “The superiority you discern in me,” she concurred, “announces my futility. If you knew,” she sighed, “the dreams of my youth!” But our realities are what has brought us together. We’re beaten brothers in arms.”

— Henry James

326. “We were cut off, really, together; we were united in our danger.”

— Henry James

327. “He fairly glittered in the gloom.”

— Henry James

328. “I was on the point of saying that a happy chance had favoured him, but it occurs to me that one is under no obligation to call chances by flattering epithets when they have been waited for so long.”

— Henry James

329. “I don’t like it, but I’m a person, thank goodness, who can do what I don’t like.”

— Henry James

330. “He has depths of silence – which he breaks only at the longest intervals by a remark. And when the remark comes it’s always something he has seen or felt for himself – never a bit banal. That would be what one might have feared and what would kill me. But never.”

— Henry James

331. “Ah, one doesn’t give up one’s country any more than one gives UP one’s grandmother. They’re both antecedent to choice – elements of one’s composition that are not to be eliminated.”

— Henry James

332. “My dear young lady,′ said her distinguished friend, ‘isn’t “to live” exactly what I’m trying to persuade you to take the trouble to do?”

— Henry James

333. “But you must remember that justice to a lovely being is after all a florid sort of sentiment.”

— Henry James

334. “I don’t approve of myself in the least. Sometimes it comes over me – how I should object to myself if I were not myself.”

— Henry James

335. “It isn’t a question of any beauty,’ said Maggie; ‘it’s only a question of the quantity of truth.’ ‘Oh the quantity of truth!’ the Prince richly though ambiguously murmured.”

— Henry James

336. “The American girl isn’t ANY girl; she’s a remarkable specimen in a remarkable species.”

— Henry James

337. “Her tact had to reckon with the Atlantic Ocean, the General Post-Office and the extravagant curve of the globe.”

— Henry James

338. “I have heard many a young unmarried lady exclaim with a bold sweep of conception, “Ah me! I wish I were a widow!” Mrs. Keith was precisely the widow that young unmarried ladies wish to be. With her diamonds in her dressing-case and her carriage in her stable, and without a feather’s weight of encumbrance, she offered a finished example of satisfied ambition.”

— Henry James

339. “We must see the old king; we must “do” the cathedral,’ he said; ‘we must know all about it. If we could but take,’ he exhaled, ‘the full opportunity!’ And then while, for all they seemed to give him, he sounded again her eyes: ‘I feel the day like a great gold cup that we must somehow drain together.”

— Henry James

340. “She was to feel henceforth as if she were flattening her nose upon the hard window-pane of the sweet-shop of knowledge.”

— Henry James

341. “The real offense, as she ultimately perceived, was in having a mind of her own at all.”

— Henry James

342. “Spiritual age is determined by the acts which make the mornings and evenings of the soul, and not by the motions of the physical globe. The soul should have its own cycles and revolutions, presenting in turn every portion of its existence to the vivifying influence of the great source of light.”

— Henry James

343. “When I tell you I love you it’s simply what I came for. I thought it was for something else; but it was for that. I shouldn’t say it if I didn’t believe I should never see you again. It’s the last time – let me pluck a single flower! I’ve no right to say that, I know; and you’ve no right to listen. But you don’t listen; you never listen, you’re always thinking of something else.”

— Henry James

344. “This impression came out most for Maggie when, in their easier intervals, they had only themselves to regard, and when her companion’s inveteracy of never passing first, of not sitting till she was seated, of not interrupting till she appeared to give leave, of not forgetting too familiarly that in addition to being important she was also sensitive, had the effect of throwing over their intercourse a kind of silver tissue of decorum. It.”

— Henry James

345. “We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosity.”

— Henry James

346. “I don’t think I can attempt to say now what it was. Some day – perhaps.”

— Henry James

347. “She had taken his measure; he was made incorrigibly to try, irredeemably to fail – to be, in short, eternally defeated and eternally unaware. He wouldn’t rage he couldn’t, for the citadel might, in that case, have been carried by his assault; he would only spend his life in walking round and round it, asking everyone he met how in the name of goodness one did get in.”

— Henry James

348. “Her real offense was having a mind of her own.”

— Henry James

349. “What it all amounted to, oddly enough, was that in his finally so simplified world this garden of death gave him the few square feet of earth on which he could still most live.”

— Henry James

350. “I reflected that I had already, with him, hurt myself beyond repair.”

— Henry James