Quotes By Henry James

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.