Henry James quotes:

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.

The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the Anglo-Saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big bayad?re of journalism, of the newspaper and the picture magazine which keeps screaming, "Look at me." Illustrations, loud simplifications... bill poster advertising ? only these stand a chance.

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

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?

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.

It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to under value them.

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

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.

There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

The news that Daisy Miller was surrounded by half a dozen wonderful mustaches checked Winterbourne's impulse to go straightway to see her.

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

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.

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

Of course what he most intensely dreams of is being taken out on walks, and the more you are able to indulge him the more will he adore you and the more all the latent beauty of his nature will come out.

In art economy is always beauty.

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

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

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

I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.

Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertnessproceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures.

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

It was the way the autumn day looked into the high windows as it waned; the way the red light, breaking at the close from under a low sombre sky, reached out in a long shaft and played over old wainscots, old tapestry, old gold, old colour."

... was after all a rather mature blossom, such as could be plucked from the stem only by a rigorous jerk."

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 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.

To read between the lines was easier than to follow the text.

I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse.

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

The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be . . .

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

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.

Take the word for it of a man who has made his way inch by inch, and does not believe that we'll wake up to find our work done because we've lain all night a-dreaming of it; anything worth doing is devilish hard to do!

Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women.

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.

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

She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.

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.

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

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

The fatal futility of Fact.

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

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

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

I don't care about anything but you, and that's enough for the present. I want you to be happy--not to think of anything sad; only to feel that I'm near you and I love you. Why should there be pain? In such hours as this what have we to do with pain? That's not the deepest thing; there's something deeper.

What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?

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

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 "germ," wherever gathered, has ever been for me, "the germ of a story," and most of the stories strained to shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as remote and windblown as a casual hint.

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

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.

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.

In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.

You seemed to me to be soaring far up in the blue - to be sailing in the bright light, over the heads of men. Suddenly some one tosses up a faded rosebud - a missile that should never have reached you - and down you drop to the ground.

If he was not personally loud, however, he was deep, and during these closing days of the Roman May he knew a complacency that matched with slow irregular walks under the pines of the Villa Borghese, among the small sweet meadow-flowers and the mossy marbles.

It was the truth, vivid and monstrous, that all the while he had waited the wait was itself his portion.

[Leaves of Grass is] monstrous because it pretends to persuade the soul while it slights the intellect; because it pretends to gratify the feelings while it outrages the taste.

I could only get on at all by taking nature into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue.

Try to be someone upon whom nothing is lost!

You were reserved for my future

Our relation, all round, exists--it's a reality, and a very good one; we're mixed up, so to speak, and it's too late to change it. We must live IN it and with it

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

I never did anything in life to anyone's imagination.

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 favour of doing it.

Don't question your conscience so much--it will get out of tune like a strummed piano. Keep it for great occasions.

The historic atmosphere was there, certainly; but the historic atmosphere, scientifically considered, was no better than a villainous miasma

..her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it.

It has not been a successful life.''No -- it has only been a beautiful one.

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'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.

We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generositie.

She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.

He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of this life than of its privileges and pleasures.

Obstacles are those frightening things you see when you take you eyes off your goal.

I should think that to hear such lovely music as that would really make him feel better.The lady gave a discriminating smile. I am afraid there are moments in life when even Beethoven has nothing to say to us. We must admit, however, that they are our worst moments.

I should think that to hear such lovely music as that would really make him feel better."The lady gave a discriminating smile. I am afraid there are moments in life when even Beethoven has nothing to say to us. We must admit, however, that they are our worst moments.

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.

The finer natures were those that shone at the larger times.

The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.

I recall my fleeting instants in Savannah as the taste of a cup charged to the brim.

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

There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful useless things.

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

If I should certainly say to a novice, 'Write from experience and experience only,' I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, 'Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.'

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

I ought to tell you I'm probably your cousin.

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.

... since she might not be splendid, she would at least be immaculate.

...and the great advantage of being a literary woman, was that you could go everywhere and do everything.

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

...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...

...the great merit of the place is that one can arrange one's life here exactly as one pleases...there are facilities for every kind of habit and taste, and everything is accepted and understood.

...The peculiar air of Oxford-the air of liberty to care for the things of the mind assured and secured by machinery which is in itself a satisfaction to sense.

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.

A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.

All intimacies are based on differences.

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

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.

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

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.

Art without life is a poor affair.

Autobiography may be the preeminent kind of American expression.

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

Deep experience is never peaceful.

do you think it is better to be clever than to be good?" "Good for what?" asked the Doctor. "You are good for nothing unless you are clever.

Don't pass it by--the immediate, the real, the only, the yours.

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.

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