Quotes By Henry James

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.

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

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

In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.

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.

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.

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.