Top 500 Henry James Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “He was holding his breath so as not to inhale the odor of democracy.”

— Henry James

302. “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

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

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

305. “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

306. “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

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

— Henry James

308. “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

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

— Henry James

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

— 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. “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

313. “He fairly glittered in the gloom.”

— Henry James

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

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

— Henry James

319. “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

320. “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

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

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

323. “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

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

— Henry James

325. “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

326. “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

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

— Henry James

328. “The old-world quality in everything that she now saw had all the charm of strangeness.”

— Henry James

329. “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

330. “I don’t see what harm there is in my wishing not to tie myself. I don’t want to begin life by marrying. There are other things a woman can do.”

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

332. “But it was as if I had been looking at him for years and had known him always.”

— Henry James

333. “But even while they pretend to be lost in their fairy-tale they’re steeped in their vision of the dead restored to them.”

— Henry James

334. “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

335. “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

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

— Henry James

337. “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

338. “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

339. “The Countess was very good company and not really the featherhead she seemed; all one had to do with her was to observe the simple condition of not believing a word she said.”

— Henry James

340. “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

341. “You were reserved for my future.”

— Henry James

342. “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

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

— Henry James

344. “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

345. “I didn’t refuse often enough.”

— Henry James

346. “Absence was a sign that when it might be a question of gratifying him.”

— Henry James

347. “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

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

— Henry James

349. “Living as he now lived was like reading a good book in a poor translation...”

— Henry James

350. “The will, I believe, is the mystery of mysteries. Who can say beforehand that his will is strong? There are all kinds of indefinable currents moving to and fro between one’s will and one’s inclinations. People talk as if the two things were essentially distinct; on different sides of one’s organism, like the heart and the liver. I believe there is a certain group of circumstances possible for every man, in which his will is destined to snap like a dry twig.”

— Henry James