Top 500 Henry James Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Do you know I sometimes think that I’m a man of genius, half finished? The genius has been left out, the faculty of expression is wanting; but the need for expression remains, and I spend my days groping for the latch of a closed door.”

— Henry James

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

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

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

407. “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

408. “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

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

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

411. “I like places in which things have happened – even if they’re sad things.”

— Henry James

412. “She certainly had been a fact of rapid growth; but the world was wide, each day was more and more a new lesson. There.”

— Henry James

413. “That accurst autobiographic form which puts a premium on the loose, the improvised, the cheap, and the easy.”

— Henry James

414. “Her chief dread in life, at this period of her development, was that she would appear narrow minded; what she feared next afterwards was that she should be so.”

— Henry James

415. “If she had troubles she must keep them to herself, and if life was difficult it would not make it easier to confess herself beaten.”

— Henry James

416. “When you are embarrassed, do as you think best, and you will do very well. When you are in a difficulty, judge for yourself.”

— Henry James

417. “The place suggested a convent with the modern improvements – an asylum in which privacy, though unbroken, might be not quite identical with privation, and meditation, though monotonous, might be of a cheerful cast.”

— Henry James

418. “People are proud only when they have something to lose, and humble when they have something to gain.”

— Henry James

419. “And to ply them with that evil still, to keep up the work of demons, is what brings the others back.”

— Henry James

420. “I never know what I mean in my telegrams – especially those I send from America. Clearness is too expensive.”

— Henry James

421. “She gave an envious thought to the happier lot of men, who are always free to plunge into the healing waters of action.”

— Henry James

422. “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

423. “She has only one fault; too many ideas.”

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

425. “What we often take to be the new is simply the old under some novel form.”

— Henry James

426. “He knew there were disappointments that lasted as long as life.”

— Henry James

427. “She was afraid,′ said Mrs. Bread, very confidently; ’she has always been afraid, or at least for a long time. That was the real trouble, sir. She was like a fair peach, I may say, with just one little speck. She had one little sad spot. You pushed her into the sunshine, sir, and it almost disappeared. Then they pulled her back into the shade and in a moment it began to spread. Before we knew it she was gone. She was a delicate creature.”

— Henry James

428. “There’s no romance here but what you may have brought with you.”

— Henry James

429. “They might in short have represented any mystery they would; the point being predominantly that the key to the mystery, the key that could wind and unwind it without a snap of the spring, was there in her pocket – or rather, no doubt, clasped at this crisis in her hand and pressed, as she walked back and forth, to her breast. She.”

— Henry James

430. “Adversity had not only ruined him, it had frightened him, and he was evidently going through his remnant of life on tiptoe, for fear of waking up the hostile fates.”

— Henry James

431. “I have a household of good books, and reading tends to take for me the place of experience – or rather to become itself experience concentrated. You will say this is a dull picture, but I cultivate dulness in a world grown too noisy.”

— Henry James

432. “I’ve struck up a tremendous intimacy with Conte Alberto, and we literally can’t live without each other. He is the first object my eyes greet in the morning, and the last at night.”

— Henry James

433. “Oh we’re not loved. We’re not even hated. We’re only just sweetly ignored.”

— Henry James

434. “He reconstructed a possible groping Chad of three or four years before, a Chad who had, after all, simply – for that was the only way to see it – been too vulgar for his privilege. Surely it was a privilege to have been young and happy just there. Well, the best thing Strether knew of him was that he had had such a dream.”

— Henry James

435. “When I read a novel my imagination starts off at a gallop and leaves the narrator hidden in a cloud of dust; I have to come jogging twenty miles back to the denouement.”

— Henry James

436. “We please the people we don’t care for, we displease those we do!”

— Henry James

437. “The stale September days, in the huge half-empty town, had a charm wrapped in them as a coloured gem might be wrapped in a dusty cloth.”

— Henry James

438. “We see our lives from our own point of view; that is the privilege of the weakest and humblest of us;.”

— Henry James

439. “So far had Douglas presented his picture when someone put a question. “And what did the former governess die of? – of so much respectability?” Our friend’s answer was prompt. “That will come out. I don’t anticipate.”

— Henry James

440. “He’s the victim of a critical age; he has ceased to believe in himself and he doesn’t know what to believe in.”

— Henry James

441. “The strangest thing of all for Milly was perhaps the uplifted assurance and indifference with which she could simply give back the particular bland stare that appeared in such cases to mark civilisation at its highest. It.”

— Henry James

442. “I’ve thought of you perpetually, ever since I last saw you. I’m exactly the same. I love you just as much, and everything I said to you then is just as true.”

— Henry James

443. “They haven’t been good – they’ve only been absent. It has been easy to live with them because they’re simply leading a life of their own.”

— Henry James

444. “She was all too sunk in the inevitable, and the abysmal.”

— Henry James

445. “She absolutely declined to be puzzled; she turned her eyes to the flame of the candle as if the question were as irrelevant, or at any rate as impersonal, as Mrs. Marcet or nine-times-nine.”

— Henry James

446. “And the figure of the income he had arrived at had never been high enough to look any one in the face.”

— Henry James

447. “Is to bring about for them such a complexity of relations – unless indeed we call it a simplicity! – that the situation has to wind itself up. They want to go back.”

— Henry James

448. “With all her love of knowledge she had a natural shrinking from raising curtains and looking into unlighted corners.”

— Henry James

449. “I’ve been deceived too often; I’ve ceased to form attachments, to permit myself to feel attractions.”

— Henry James

450. “How on the other hand could I make a reference without a new plunge into the hideous obscure?”

— Henry James