Quotes from Henry James

I always want to know the things one shouldn't do." "So as to do them?" asked her aunt. "So as to choose," said Isabel

She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering.

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

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.

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

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?

Never say you know the last word about any human heart.

Try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost.

Obstacles are those frightening things you see when you take you eyes off your goal.

She is written in a foreign tongue.

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

I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.

Things are always different than what they might be...If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.

Be not afraid of life believe that life is worth living and your belief will create the fact.

If this was love, love had been overrated.

If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.

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

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.

If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.

The deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer...No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind.

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.

Art is a point of view, and a genius way of looking at things.

Art requires, above all things, a suppression of self, a subordination of one's self to an idea.

Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions.