Henry James OM was an American author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of renowned philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James. These Henry James quotes will motivate you.
Best Henry James Quotes
- “Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.” ~ Henry James
- “Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.” ~ Henry James
- “Excellence does not require perfection.” ~ Henry James
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“It’s time to start living the life you’ve imagined.” ~ Henry James
- “Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.” ~ Henry James
- “Until you try, you don’t know what you can’t do.” ~ Henry James
- “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.” ~ Henry James
- “You must save what you can of your life; you musn’t lose it all simply because you’ve lost a part.” ~ Henry James
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“And remember this, that if you’ve been hated, you’ve also been loved.” ~ Henry James
- “True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one’s self; but the point is not only to get out – you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.” ~ Henry James
- “Life is a predicament which precedes death.” ~ Henry James
- “Sorrow comes in great waves…but rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us, it leaves us. And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain.” ~ 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.” ~ Henry James
- “Don’t try so much to form your character – it’s like trying to pull open a tight, tender young rose. Live as you like best and your character will take care of itself.” ~ Henry James
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“Deep experience is never peaceful.” ~ Henry James
- “There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.” ~ Henry James
- “I call people rich when they’re able to meet the requirements of their imagination.” ~ Henry James
- “I don’t want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.” ~ Henry James
- “If you have work to do, don’t wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.” ~ Henry James
- “To believe in a child is to believe in the Future.” ~ Henry James
- “The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself.” ~ Henry James
- “Never say you know the last word about any human heart.” ~ Henry James
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“if you are going to be pushed you had better jump” ~ Henry James
- “She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy!” ~ Henry James
- “It is no wonder he wins every game. He has never done a thing in his life except play games” ~ Henry James
- “The main object of the novel is to represent life. . .The success of a work of art, to my mind, maybe measured by the degree to which it produces a certain illusion; that illusion makes it appear to us for the time that we have lived another life – that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience.” ~ Henry James
- “I am incapable of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel, I say – feel for all you’re worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live.” ~ Henry James
- “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?” ~ Henry James
- “Love has nothing to do with good reasons.” ~ Henry James
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“Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.” ~ Henry James
- “Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation.” ~ Henry James
- “Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.” ~ Henry James
- “To live in the world of creation-to get into it and stay in it-to frequent it and haunt it…to think intently and fruitfully, to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation-this is the only thing.” ~ Henry James
- “Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.” ~ Henry James
- “Money’s a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.” ~ Henry James
- “One can’t judge till one’s forty; before that we’re too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.” ~ Henry James
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“She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.” ~ Henry James
- “Americans will eat garbage provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup.” ~ Henry James
- “It’s never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools.” ~ Henry James
- “The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.” ~ Henry James
- “I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine-tenths of the people I meet.” ~ Henry James
- “Make the short story tremendously succinct – with a very short pulse or rhythm – and the closest selection of detail – in other words, summarise intensely and deeply and keep down the lateral development. It should be a little gem of bright, quick, vivid form” ~ Henry James
- “Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world insists upon its importance.” ~ Henry James
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“Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!” ~ Henry James
- “To take what there is in life 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.” ~ Henry James
- “There’s no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.” ~ Henry James
- “Things are always different from what they might be.” ~ Henry James
- “The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.” ~ Henry James
- “He is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease.” ~ Henry James
- “She had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.” ~ Henry James
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“One doesn’t defend one’s god: one’s god is in himself a defense.” ~ Henry James
- “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.” ~ Henry James
- “Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.” ~ Henry James
- “A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.” ~ Henry James
- “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
- “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.” ~ Henry James
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“All intimacies are based on differences.” ~ Henry James
- “Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.” ~ Henry James
- “Don’t underestimate the value of irony—it is extremely valuable.” ~ Henry James
- “Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better.” ~ Henry James
- “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
- “…he had long decided that abundant laughter should be the embellishment of the remainder of his days.” ~ Henry James
- “If I should certainly say to a novice, ‘Write from experience and experience only,’ I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.'” ~ Henry James
- “I think patriotism is like charity — it begins at home.” ~ Henry James
- “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.” ~ Henry James
