Henry James Quotes - Page 3

One can't judge till one's forty; before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.

When you forget to eat, you know you're alive.

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

I have in my own fashion learned the lesson that life is effort, unremittingly repeated.

Things are always different from what they might be.

One doesn't defend one's god: one's god is in himself a defense.

There's no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.

I am incapable of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel, I say - feel for all you're worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live.

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

To live in the world of creation-to get into it and stay in it-to frequent it and haunt it...to think intently and fruitfully, to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation-this is the only thing.

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

Make the short story tremendously succinct - with a very short pulse or rhythm - and the closest selection of detail - in other words summarise intensely and deeply and keep down the lateral development. It should be a little gem of bright, quick, vivid form

The deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer...No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind.

All intimacies are based on differences.

Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.

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.

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

We must for dear life make our own counter-realities.

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?

In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.

...he had long decided that abundant laughter should be the embellishment of the remainder of his days.

If you haven't had your life what have you had?

I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.

He is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease.