Quotes from Henry James

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

The fatal futility of Fact.

Live all you can; it's a mistake not to.

To take what there is in life 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.

Things are always different from what they might be.

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

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

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

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.

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

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

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.

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

London is on the whole the most possible form of life.

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.

I have only to let myself go! So I have said all my life, yet I have never fully done it.

If you haven't had your life what have you had?

...the great merit of the place is that one can arrange one's life here exactly as one pleases...there are facilities for every kind of habit and taste, and everything is accepted and understood.

There are women who are for all your 'times of life.' They're the most wonderful sort.

Art without life is a poor affair.

Keep making the movements of life.

She had a certain way of looking at life which he took as a personal offense.

In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.

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