Explore Quotes by Henry James

Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

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.

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.

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

Deep experience is never peaceful.

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.

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.

Excellence does not require perfection.

And remember this, that if you've been hated, you've also been loved.

It was the way the autumn day looked into the high windows as it waned; the way the red light, breaking at the close from under a low sombre sky, reached out in a long shaft and played over old wainscots, old tapestry, old gold, old colour.

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!

Things are always different from what they might be.

You are good for nothing unless you are clever.

He valued life and literature equally for the light they threw upon each other; to his mind one implied the other; he was unable to conceive of them apart.

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.

Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness... proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures.

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.

It is no wonder he wins every game. He has never done a thing in his life exept play games

Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of 'liking' a work of art or not liking it; the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test.

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