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Henry James Quotes


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

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

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

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

Deep experience is never peaceful.

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

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.

However British you may be, I am more British still.

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

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.

I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.

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.

I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.

In art economy is always beauty.

In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.

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.

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.

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