Explore Quotes by Henry James

Never say you know the last word about any human heart.

My idea is this, that when you only love a little you're naturally not jealous — or are only jealous also a little, so that it doesn't matter. But when you love in a deeper and intenser way, then you're in the very same proportion jealous; your jealousy has intensity and, no doubt, ferocity.

Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.

Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.

My father ain't in Europe; my father's in a better place than Europe." Winterbourne imagined for a moment that this was the manner in which the child had been taught to intimate that Mr. Miller had been removed to the sphere of celestial reward. But Randolph immediately added, "My father's in Schenectady.

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

I always want to know the things one shouldn't do." "So as to do them?" asked her aunt. "So as to choose." said Isabel

I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.

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.

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 is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.

I had an excellent repast - the best repast possible - which consisted simply of boiled eggs and bread and butter. It was the quality of these simple ingredients that made the occasion memorable. The eggs were so good that I am ashamed to say how many of them I consumed ....It might seem that an egg which has succeeded in being fresh has done all that can be reasonably expected of it.

It had been agreed between them that lighted candles at wayside inns, in strange countries amid mountain scenery, gave the evening meal a peculiar poetry.

Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation.

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance.

It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete

Little by little, even with other cares, the slowly but surely working poison of the garden-mania begins to stir in my long-sluggish veins.

Everything about Florence seems to be colored with a mild violet, like diluted wine.

The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be . . .

She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy!