Famous Quotes

Quotes by Henry James

• A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.
• Deep experience is never peaceful.
• 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.
• I adore adverbs they are the only qualifications I really much respect.
• 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.
• Ideas are, in truth, force.
• In art economy is always beauty.
• 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 true that the aristocracies seem to have abused their monopoly of legal knowledge and at all events their exclusive possession of the law was a formidable impediment to the success of those popular movements which began to be universal in the western world.
• It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
• It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
• Law is stable the societies we are speaking of are progressive. The greater or less happiness of a people depends on the degree of promptitude with which the gulf is narrowed.
• Life is a predicament which precedes death.
• Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.
• Our authorities leave us no doubt that the trust lodged with the oligarchy was sometimes abused, but it certainly ought not to be regarded as a mere usurpation or engine of tyranny.
• 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 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.
• 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?
• 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.