Henry James

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

It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to under value them.

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

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

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.

The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.

Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

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

Excellence does not require perfection.

No, no—there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don’t know what I don’t see—what I don’t fear!

There were always people to snatch at you, and it would never occur to them that they were eating you up. They did that without tasting.

One can't judge till one's forty; before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.

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.

You seemed to me to be soaring far up in the blue - to be sailing in the bright light, over the heads of men. Suddenly some one tosses up a faded rosebud - a missile that should never have reached you - and down you drop to the ground.

I have in my own fashion learned the lesson that life is effort, unremittingly repeated.

I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination.

I don't want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.

Don’t underestimate the value of irony—it is extremely valuable.