Top 500 Henry James Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

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

— Henry James

353. “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

354. “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

355. “The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it-this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education.”

— Henry James

356. “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

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

— Henry James

358. “Our relation, all round, exists – it’s a reality, and a very good one; we’re mixed up, so to speak, and it’s too late to change it. We must live IN it and with it.”

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

360. “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

361. “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

362. “Absence was a sign that when it might be a question of gratifying him she had grown used to spare no pains, and I fancied her rummaging in some.”

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

364. “They had found themselves looking at each other straight, and for a longer time on end than was usual even at parties in galleries; but that, after all, would have been a small affair, if there hadn’t been something else with it. It wasn’t, in a word, simply that their eyes had met; other conscious organs, faculties, feelers had met as well.”

— Henry James

365. “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

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

— Henry James

367. “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

368. “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

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

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

371. “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

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

— Henry James

373. “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

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

— Henry James

375. “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

376. “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

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

— Henry James

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

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

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

386. “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

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

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

389. “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

390. “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

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

395. “When Milly smiled it was a public event – when she didn’t it was a chapter of history. They.”

— Henry James

396. “There is always a place for chance in things.”

— Henry James

397. “No,’ she sadly insisted – ’men don’t know. They know in such matters almost nothing but what women show them.”

— Henry James

398. “What young man had ever paraded about that way, without a reason, a maiden in her flower? And.”

— Henry James

399. “Take things more easily. Don’t ask yourself so much whether this or that is good for you. Don’t question your conscience so much – it will get out of tune, like a strummed piano. Keep it for great occasions. Don’t try so much to form your character – it’s like trying to pull open a rosebud. Live as you like best, and your character will form itself.”

— Henry James

400. “I want to bring them down, – down, down, down! I want to turn the tables upon them – I want to mortify them as they mortified me. They took me up into a high place and made me stand there for all the world to see me, and then they stole behind me and pushed me into this bottomless pit, where I lie howling and gnashing my teeth! I made a fool of myself before all their friends; but I shall make something worse of them.”

— Henry James