Henry James Quotes about Art

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.

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.

In art economy is always beauty.

The main object of the novel is to represent life. . .The success of a work of art, to my mind, may be measured by the degree to which it produces a certain illusion; that illusion makes it appear to us for the time that we have lived another life - that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience.

Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.

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.

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.

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.

Art without life is a poor affair.

We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art...what we are talking about and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered. 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.

Art does not lie in copying nature.- Nature furnishes the material by means of which is to express a beauty still unexpressed in nature.-The artist beholds in nature more than she herself is conscious of.

Life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection, the latter, in search of the hard latent value with which it alone is concerned, sniffs round the mass as instinctively and unerringly as a dog suspicious of some buried bone.

The artist beholds in nature more than she herself Nature is conscious of.

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance.

In a play, certainly, the subject is of more importance than in any other work of art. Infelicity, triviality, vagueness of subject, may be outweighed in a poem, a novel, or a picture, by charm of manner, by ingenuity of execution; but in a drama the subject is of the essence of the work-it is the work. If it is feeble, the work can have no force; if it is shapeless, the work must be amorphous.

Art requires, above all things, a suppression of self, a subordination of one's self to an idea.

Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of 'liking' a work of art or not liking it; the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test.

Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions.

The practice of "reviewing"... in general has nothing in common with the art of criticism.

Art is a point of view, and a genius way of looking at things.

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?