Henry James Quotes

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

It's time to start living the life you've imagined.

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.

We work in 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.

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

Everything about Florence seems to be colored with a mild violet, like diluted wine.

Excellence does not require perfection.

The Roman jurisprudence has the longest known history of any set of human institutions.

I'm yours for ever--for ever and ever. Here I stand; I'm as firm as a rock. If you'll only trust me, how little you'll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours.

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

Americans will eat garbage provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup.

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

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

You must save what you can of your life; you musn't lose it all simply because you've lost a part.

There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.

Until you try, you don't know what you can't do.

Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.

She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy!

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

She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering.

Deep experience is never peaceful.

And remember this, that if you've been hated, you've also been loved.

Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!

Never say you know the last word about any human heart.

She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.

Sorrow comes in great waves...but rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us, it leaves us. And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain.

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 ancient codes were doubtless originally suggested by the discovery and diffusion of the art of writing.

I think patriotism is like charity -- it begins at home.

I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.

if you are going to be pushed you had better jump

The inquiries of the jurist are in truth prosecuted much as inquiry in physic and physiology was prosecuted before observation had taken the place of assumption.

Our authorities leave us no doubt that the trust lodged with the oligarchy was sometimes abused, but it certainly ought not to be regarded as a mere usurpation or engine of tyranny.

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.

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

Live all you can; it's a mistake not to.

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

True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get out - you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.

Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.

To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that; this, doubtless, is the right way to live.

The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself.

There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.

A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see--that’s my idea of happiness.

Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.

His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed.

In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.

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

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete

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

When primitive law has once been embodied in a Code, there is an end to what may be called its spontaneous development.