Henry James Quotes - Page 4

Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.

You are good for nothing unless you are clever.

To believe in a child is to believe in the future. Through their aspirations they will save the world. With their combined knowledge the turbulent seas of hate and injustice will be calmed.

God's creature is one. He makes man, not men. His true creature is unitary and infinite, revealing himself, indeed, in every finite form, but compromised by none.

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it-this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education.

We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have.

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.

The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.

Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better.

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

I take up my own pen again - the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. To myself - today - I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.

The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.

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

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.

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

Don't pass it by - the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist's that it waits for.

I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.

She had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.

Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.

It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent.

If this was love, love had been overrated.

Instead of leading to the high places of happiness, from which the world would seem to lie below one, so that one could look down with a sense of exaltation and advantage, and judge and choose and pity, it led rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and depression, where the sound of other lives, easier and freer, was heard as from above, and served to deepen the feeling of failure.

I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse.

I'm yours for ever--for ever and ever. Here I stand; I'm as firm as a rock. If you'll only trust me, how little you'll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours.

Art without life is a poor affair.