Best 292 quotes of Henry James on MyQuotes

Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.

All intimacies are based on differences.

All roads lead to Rome, and there were times when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground.

All the same don't forget that you're young — blessedly young; be glad of it on the contrary and live up to it. 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.

Always keep a window in the attic open; not just cracked: open.

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

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

Am I solemn? I had an idea I was grinning from ear to ear." "You look as if you were taking me to a prayer-meeting or a funeral. If that's a grin your ears are very near together." "Should you like me to dance a hornpipe on the deck?" "Pray do, and I'll carry round your hat. It'll pay the expenses of our journey.

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

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

Any point of view is interesting that is a direct impression of life. You each have an impression colored by your individual conditions; make that into a picture, a picture framed by your own personal wisdom, your glimpse of the American world.

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

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.

Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.

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

A solitary maple on a woodside flames in single scarlet, recalls nothing so much as the daughter of a noble house dressed for a fancy ball, with the whole family gathered around to admire her before she goes.

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

Autobiography may be the preeminent kind of American expression.

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

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

Deep experience is never peaceful.

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.

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

Don't try so much to form your character - it's like trying to pull open a tight, tender young rose. Live as you like best and your character will take care of itself.

Don’t underestimate the value of irony—it is extremely valuable.

England always seems to me like a man swimming with his clothes on his head.

Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better.

Every governmental institution has been a standing testimony to the harmonic destiny of society, a standing proof that the life of man is destined for peace and amity, instead of disorder and contention.

Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject's roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.

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

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete

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.

Experience was to be taken as showing that one might get a five-pound note as one got a light for a cigarette; but one had to check the friendly impulse to ask for it in the same way.

God's creature is one. He makes man, not men. His true creature is unitary and infinite, revealing himself, indeed, in every finite form, but compromised by none.

Happy you poets who can be present and so present by a simple flicker of your genius, and not, like the clumsier race, have to laya train and pile up faggots that may not after prove in the least combustible!

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

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

Her chief dread in life, at this period of her development, was that she would appear narrow minded; what she feared next afterwards was that she should be so.

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

Her memory's your love. You want no other.

Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.

He valued life and literature equally for the light they threw upon each other; to his mind one implied the other; he was unable to conceive of them apart.

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

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

I always want to know the things one shouldn't do." "So as to do them?" asked her aunt. "So as to choose." said Isabel

I am blackly bored when they are at large and at work; but somehow I am still more blackly bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them.

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.

I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.