1843-1916, American Author
A man who pretends to understand women is ad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.
Henry James – [Understanding]
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
Henry James – [Life and Living]
Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.
Henry James – [Animals]
Deep experience is never peaceful.
Henry James – [Experience]
Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
Henry James – [Judgment and Judges]
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.
Henry James – [Experience]
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.
Henry James – [Tact and Tactfulness]
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.
Henry James – [Writers and Writing]
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.
Henry James – [Feminism]
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.
Henry James – [Simplicity]
I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
Henry James – [Writers and Writing]
I think patriotism is like charity — it begins at home.
Henry James – [Patriotism]
Ideas are, in truth, force.
Henry James – [Ideas]
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.
Henry James – [Exile]
In art economy is always beauty.
Henry James – [Editing and Editors]
In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.
Henry James – [Museums and Galleries]
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.
Henry James – [Arts and Artists]
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.
Henry James – [America]
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
Henry James – [Literature]
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. If you haven't had that what have you had?
Henry James – [Life and Living]