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Henry James Quotes

Total quotes: 27
“I’ve always been interested in people, but I’ve never liked them.”
— Henry James, The Ambassadors
Tagged: Pessimist
“Do not mind anything anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything yourself.”
— Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
Tagged: Self-Worth, Don't Listen To Negativity, Encouraging, Calm Catalog
“Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
— Henry James, Quotes About Summer
Tagged: Henry James, Love, Summer
“It has made me better, loving you.”
— Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
Tagged: Love, Loving Someone
“And remember this, that if you've been hated, you've also been loved.”
— Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (Penguin Classics)
Tagged: Love, Hate
“To take what there is, and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived — to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that — this doubtless is the right way to live.”
— Henry James, The Notebooks of Henry James
Tagged: Take, Use, Making the most out of life, Life, way of life, Living
“I'm yours for ever--for ever and ever. Here I stand; I'm as firm as a rock. If you'll only trust me, how little you'll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours.”
— Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
Tagged: Love, romance, Affectionate, Patience, Trust
“It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.”
— Henry James, Letter to H.G. Wells
Tagged: Art, Art Makes Life, interests, beauty, force, process
“The real offence, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his — attached to his own like a small garden-plot to a deer-park.”
— Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
Tagged: Individuality, Independence, Own Mind, Dominance
“She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.”
— Henry James, What Maisie Knew
Tagged: Refuge, fiction, fact, Truth, Knowledge
“Live all you can: it's a mistake not to. It doesn't matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?”
— Henry James, The Ambassadors
Tagged: live, Live All You Can, Living, Do What Makes You Happy
“There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.”
— Henry James, The Europeans
Tagged: Understanding, Women, What She Really Means, What She Says
“She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering.”
— Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
Tagged: Curiosity, Wonder, Life
“He would agree that life is a little worth living — or worth living a little; but would remark that, unfortunately, to live little enough, we have to live a great deal.”
— Henry James, Hawthorne
Tagged: Life, Living, Worth Living, Life's Worth, Great Deal
“Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.”
— Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
Tagged: Imagination, Active, Creativity
“You must save what you can of your life; you musn't lose it all simply because you've lost a part.”
— Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (Penguin Classics)
“Things are always different than what they might be...If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything”
— Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
Tagged: Change, Things Change, Waiting
“The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life”
— Henry James, The Art of Fiction
Tagged: novel, Existnce, Life, Representation
“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.”
— Henry James, Roderick Hudson
Tagged: Happiness, Genuine, Going Out, Self love
“Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.”
— Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
Tagged: Reputation, Reading, Books, Knowledge
“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.”
— Henry James, The Middle Years
Tagged: Work, Darkness, Generosity, Doubt, Passion, Art, Giving, task
“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”
— Henry James, Hawthorne
Tagged: History, Literature, Produce, Writing, Reading
“[She] is written in a foreign tongue.”
— Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
Tagged: not understanding someone, human differences, Relationships, understanding someone
“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.”
— Henry James, The Art of Fiction
Tagged: Experience, Sensibility, Consciousness
“Love has nothing to do with good reasons.”
— Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
Tagged: Love, Reasons, romance
“Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.”
— Henry James, Theory of Fiction
Tagged: Life, Adversity, perseverance, Struggle, Evil, Awake
“It has made me better, loving you. It has made me wiser, and easier, and brighter. I used to want a great many things before, and to be angry that I did not have them. Theoretically, I was satisfied. I flattered myself that I had limited my wants. But I was subject to irritation; I used to have morbid sterile hateful fits of hunger, of desire. Now I really am satisfied, because I can’t think of anything better.”
— Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (Penguin Classics)
Tagged: Love, Dating, Marriage
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