Quotes By Henry James

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

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

I adore adverbs; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.

The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy... what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be?

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them.

I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.

Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.

In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.

Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.

In art economy is always beauty.

The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.

An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue.

I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it.

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

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

Deep experience is never peaceful.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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