Quotes By Henry James

Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.

A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.

Deep experience is never peaceful.

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.

Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women.

It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance... and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.

One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?

We work n the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.

To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.

However British you may be, I am more British still.

Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had?

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

I think I don't regret a single 'excess' of my responsive youth - I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.

There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.