Quotes By Henry James

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.