Henry James quotes - page 3

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. (Henry James)
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. View quote
Henry James
Love has nothing to do with good reasons. View quote
Henry James
If one is strong, one loves the more strongly. View quote
Henry James
A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it. View quote
Henry James
To take what there is, 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. View quote
Henry James
Never say you know the last word about any human heart. View quote
Henry James
Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window. View quote
Henry James
She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering. View quote
Henry James
Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic. View quote
Henry James
The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take. (Henry James)
In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons. View quote
Henry James
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. View quote
Henry James
We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar. View quote
Henry James
The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality. View quote
Henry James
She is written in a foreign tongue. View quote
Henry James
Most English talk is a quadrille in a sentry-box. View quote
Henry James
No, no-there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don't know what I don't see-what I don't fear! View quote
Henry James
If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense? View quote
Henry James
She had a certain way of looking at life which he took as a personal offense. View quote
Henry James
The effect, if not the prime office, of criticism is to make our absorption and our enjoyment of the things that feed the mind as aware of itself as possible, since that awareness quickens the mental demand, which thus in turn wanders further and further for pasture. This action on the part of the mind practically amounts to a reaching out for the reasons of its interest, as only by its ascertaining them can the interest grow more various. This is the very education of our imaginative life. (Henry James)
Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so. View quote
Henry James
No themes are so human as those that reflect for us, out of the confusion of life, the close connection of bliss and bale, of the things that help with the things that hurt, so dangling before us forever that bright hard medal, of so strange an alloy, one face of which is somebody's right and ease and the other somebody's pain and wrong. View quote
Henry James
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. View quote
Henry James
She ordered a cup of tea, which proved excessively bad, and this gave her a sense that she was suffering in a romantic cause. View quote
Henry James