Top 500 Henry James Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “These three words from her were in a flash like the glitter of a drawn blade, the jostle of the cup that my hand for weeks and weeks had held high and full to the brim and that now, even before speaking, I felt overflow in a deluge.”

— Henry James

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

355. “You were reserved for my future.”

— Henry James

356. “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

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

— Henry James

358. “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

359. “I didn’t refuse often enough.”

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

361. “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

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

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

364. “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

365. “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

366. “What was at all events not permanently hidden from him was a truth much less invidious about his years of darkness. It was the strange scheme of things again: the years of darkness had been needed to render possible the years of light.”

— Henry James

367. “She had none the less extracted from her a vow in respect to the time that if the Colonel might be depended on they would spend at Fawns; and nothing came home to her more in this connexion or inspired her with a more intimate interest than her sense of absolutely seeing her interlocutress forbear to observe that Charlotte’s view of a long visit even from such allies was there to be reckoned with.”

— Henry James

368. “He put into his one little glass everything he raised to his lips, and it was as if he had always carried in his pocket, like a tool of his trade, this receptacle, a little glass cut with a fineness of which the art had long since been lost, and kept in an old morocco case stamped in uneffaceable gilt with the arms of a deposed dynasty.”

— Henry James

369. “It was the hushed daybreak of the Roman revelation in particular that he could usually best recover – the way that there above all, where the princes and popes had been before him, his divination of his faculty had gone to his head. He.”

— Henry James

370. “She saw herself in this connexion without detachment – saw others alone with intensity; otherwise she might have been struck, fairly have been amused, by her free assignment of the pachydermatous quality. If.”

— Henry James

371. “Any deep harmony that might eventually govern them would not be the result of their having much in common – having anything, in fact, but their affection; and would really find its explanation in some sense, on the part of each, of being poor where the other was rich.”

— Henry James

372. “Prettiness is terribly vulgar nowadays, and it is not every one that knows just the sort of ugliness that has chic.”

— Henry James

373. “The perfection of her success, decidedly, was like some strange shore to which she had been noiselessly ferried and where, with a start, she found herself quaking at the thought that the boat might have put off again and left her. The.”

— Henry James

374. “He envied Miss Barrace at any rate her power of not being.”

— Henry James

375. “I don’t talk for your amusement.”

— Henry James

376. “It’s exactly the thing that I’m reduced to doing for myself. It seems to rescue a little, you see, from the wreck of hopes and ambitions, the refuse-heap of disappointments and failures, my one presentable little scrap of an identity.”

— Henry James

377. “She sometimes felt a sort of passion of tenderness for memories which had led no other merit than that they belonged to her unmarried life.”

— Henry James

378. “Susie had an intense thought and then an effusion. ‘My dear child, we move in a labyrinth.’ ‘Of course we do. That’s just the fun of it!’ said Milly with a strange gaiety. Then she added: ‘Don’t tell me that – in this for instance – there are not abysses. I want abysses.”

— Henry James

379. “It’s out of all reason, the number of things you think wrong. Put back your watch. Diet your fever. Spread your wings; rise above the ground. It’s never wrong to do that.” She.”

— Henry James

380. “Basil Ransom had got up just as Mrs. Luna made this last declaration; for a young lady had glided into the room, who stopped short as it fell upon her ears. She stood there looking, consciously and rather seriously, at Mr. Ransom; a smile of exceeding faintness played about her lips – it was just perceptible enough to light up the native gravity of her face. It might have been likened to a thin ray of moonlight resting upon the wall of a prison.”

— Henry James

381. “Her desire to think well of herself had at least the element of humility that it always needed to be supported by proof.”

— Henry James

382. “He found on the spot the image of his recent history; he was like one of the figures of the old clock at Berne. THEY came out, on one side, at their hour, jigged along their little course in the public eye, and went in on the other side. He too had jigged his little course – him too a modest retreat awaited.”

— Henry James

383. “In American, the gentlemen obey the ladies.”

— Henry James

384. “Strether had never smoked, and he felt as if he flaunted at his friend that this had been only because of a reason. The reason, it now began to appear even to himself, was that he had never had a lady to smoke with.”

— Henry James

385. “They had from an early hour made up their mind that society was, luckily, unintelligent, and the margin allowed them by this had fairly become one of their commonplaces.”

— Henry James

386. “We must feel everything, everything we can. We are here for that.”

— Henry James

387. “You’re like a picture; you ought to be enclosed in a gilt frame and stand against the wall.”

— Henry James

388. “What’s a man,’ she pursued, ’especially an ambitious one, without a variety of ideas?”

— Henry James

389. “She was keeping her head for a reason, for a cause; and the labour of this detachment, with the labour of her forcing the pitch of it down, held them together in the steel hoop of an intimacy compared with which artless passion would have been but a beating of the air. Her.”

— Henry James

390. “And she really had tones to make justice weep.”

— Henry James

391. “Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element- direct observation.”

— Henry James

392. “I ought to tell you I’m probably your cousin.”

— Henry James

393. “His absence from her for so many weeks had had such an effect upon him that his demands, his desires had grown; and only the night before, as his ship steamed, beneath summer stars, in sight of the Irish coast, he had felt all the force of his particular necessity.”

— Henry James

394. “What should one do with the misery of the world in a scheme of the agreeable for one’s self?”

— Henry James

395. “When you are successful you naturally feel more at home.”

— Henry James

396. “The secret of what passed between him and the strange girl who.”

— Henry James

397. “It was the tragic part of happiness; one’s right was always made of the wrong of some one else.”

— Henry James

398. “No evening I had passed at Bly had the portentous quality of this one; in spite of which – and in spite also of the deeper depths of consternation that had opened beneath my feet – there was literally, in the ebbing actual, an extraordinarily sweet sadness.”

— Henry James

399. “You will think you take generous views of her; but you will never begin to know through what a strange sea of feeling she passed before she accepted you. As she stood there in front of you the other day, she plunged into it. She said ‘Why not?’ to something which, a few hours earlier, had been inconceivable. She turned about on a thousand gathered prejudices and traditions as on a pivot, and looked where she had never looked hitherto.”

— Henry James

400. “I would live for you still – if I could.” Her eyes closed for a little, as if, withdrawn into herself, she were for a last time trying. “But I can’t!” she said as she raised them again to take leave of him. She couldn’t indeed, as but too promptly and sharply appeared, and he had no vision of her after this that was anything but darkness and doom.”

— Henry James