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Henry James Quotes


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Henry James
April 15, 1843 - February 28, 1916
Nationality: American
Category: Writer
Subcategory: American Writer

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

   

In art economy is always beauty.

   

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

   

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

   

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

   

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.

   

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

   

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

   

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

   

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?

   

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

   

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.

   

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

   

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

   

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

   

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.

   

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

   

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

   

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.

   

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.

   

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