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List of Henry James Quotes

Explore our hand-picked selection of 251 inspiring quotes by Henry James.

About Henry James

  • Born: April 15, 1843
  • Died: February 28, 1916
  • Occupation: Writer
    • [thomas henry] huxley is a very genial, comfortable being-yet with none of the noisy and windy geniality of some folks here, whom you find with their backs turned when you are responding to the remarks that they have made you.
    Science Noise Biographies
    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.
    Hurt Pain Confusion
    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.
    Office Mind Criticism
    It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance.
    Art Substitutes Importance
    Which of you with taking thought can add to his stature one cubit?
    Thinking Add Stature
    To live only to suffer—only to feel the injury of life repeated and enlarged—it seemed to her she was too valuable, too capable, for that. then she wondered if it were vain and stupid to think so well of herself. when had it even been a guarantee to be valuable? wasn't all history full of the destruction of precious things? wasn't it much more probable that if one were fine one would suffer?
    Stupid Thinking Suffering
    It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.
    Poetry Effort Mind
    It is altogether an extraordinary growing, swarming, glittering, pushing, chattering, good-natured, cosmopolitan place, and perhaps in some ways the best imitation of paris that can be found (with a great originality of its own).
    New York Paris Growing
    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.
    Bored Feminism Shut Up
    The image of the presence, whatever it was, waiting there for him to go -this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he stopped short of the point at which certainty would have come to him. for, with all his resolution, or more exactly with all his dread, he did stop short - he hung back from really seeing. the risk was too great and his fear too definite: it took at this moment an awful specific form.
    Fear Waiting Risk
    If we pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow him his freedom of choice , in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify.
    Artist Choices Faces
    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 expertness... proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures.
    Thinking Evil Horror
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