Henry James Quotes

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Henry James

Profession : Writer

Birth : April 15, 1843

If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.

Henry James

There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.

Henry James

Ideas are, in truth, force.

Henry James

One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.

Henry James

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

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

There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

Henry James

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.

Henry James

I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.

Henry James

In art economy is always beauty.

Henry James

What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?

Henry James

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

Henry James

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.

Henry James

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?

Henry James

Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women.

Henry James

To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.

Henry James

An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue.

Henry James

In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.

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