Quotes by Henry James

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“In art economy is always beauty.”

“Life is a predicament which precedes death.”

“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.”

“It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.”

“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”

“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.”

“Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.”

“I adore adverbs they are the only qualifications I really much respect.”

“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?”

“Ideas are, in truth, force.”

“A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.”

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