110+ Henry James Quotes On Writing, Death And Kindness

Henry James was an American-born British writer. He was one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He is best known for his novels, such as The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Henry James on writing, love, death.

Top 10 Henry James Quotes

1. Try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost.
2. Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
3. It's time to start living the life you've imagined.
4. Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
5. 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.
6. Everything about Florence seems to be colored with a mild violet, like diluted wine.
7. Americans will eat garbage provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup.
8. 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.
9. I adore adverbs; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.
10. Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.

Henry James Short Quotes

• She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy!
• Never say you know the last word about any human heart.
• It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
• I think patriotism is like charity -- it begins at home.
• Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.
• His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed.
• In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.
• Ideas are, in truth, force.
• The terrible fluidity of self-revelation.
• The fatal futility of Fact.

Henry James Quotes About Writing

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window. — Henry James

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master. — Henry James

In art economy is always beauty. — Henry James

The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending. — Henry James

Make him [the reader] think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. — Henry James

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

What is either a picture or a novel that is not character? — Henry James

I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse. — Henry James

If I should certainly say to a novice, 'Write from experience and experience only,' I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, 'Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.' — Henry James

Writing is not primarily escape, but use. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes About Love

London doesn't love the latent or the lurking, has neither time, nor taste, nor sense for anything less discernible than the red flag in front of the steam-roller. It wants cash over the counter and letters ten feet high. — Henry James

My idea is this, that when you only love a little you're naturally not jealous — or are only jealous also a little, so that it doesn't matter. But when you love in a deeper and intenser way, then you're in the very same proportion jealous; your jealousy has intensity and, no doubt, ferocity. — Henry James

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

If one is strong, one loves the more strongly. — Henry James

Love has nothing to do with good reasons. — Henry James

To say that she had a book is to say that her solitude did not press upon her; for her love of knowledge had a fertilizing quality and her imagination was strong. There was at this time, however, a want of lightness in her situation, which the arrival of an unexpected visitor did much to dispel. — Henry James

If this was love, love had been overrated. — Henry James

Her memory's your love. You want no other. — Henry James

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

Henry James Quotes About Kindness

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

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

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. — Henry James

Autobiography may be the preeminent kind of American expression. — Henry James

...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. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes About Life

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

Life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection, the latter, in search of the hard latent value with which it alone is concerned, sniffs round the mass as instinctively and unerringly as a dog suspicious of some buried bone. — Henry James

Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there. — Henry James

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

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. — Henry James

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. — Henry James

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

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

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance. — Henry James

London is on the whole the most possible form of life. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes About Experience

Deep experience is never peaceful. — Henry James

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete — Henry James

Experience was to be taken as showing that one might get a five-pound note as one got a light for a cigarette; but one had to check the friendly impulse to ask for it in the same way. — Henry James

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern . . . this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience. — Henry James

The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant - no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes About Judge

Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all! — Henry James

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

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

Henry James Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors. — 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

Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window. — Henry James

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

A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see--that’s my idea of happiness. — 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

You think too much.' 'I suppose I do; but I can’t help it, my mind is so terribly active. When I give myself, I give myself. I pay the penalty in my headaches, my famous headaches--a perfect circlet of pain! But I carry it as a queen carries her crown. — Henry James

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

I think I don't regret a single 'excess' of my responsive youth - I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace. — Henry James

We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art...what we are talking about and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered. I think I don't regret a single "excess" of my responsive youth I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace. — Henry James

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting. — Henry James

Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity. — Henry James

It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent. — Henry James

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition. — Henry James

We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have. — Henry James

He is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease. — Henry James

To live in the world of creation-to get into it and stay in it-to frequent it and haunt it...to think intently and fruitfully, to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation-this is the only thing. — Henry James

To read between the lines was easier than to follow the text. — Henry James

It is altogether an extraordinary growing, swarming, glittering, pushing, chattering, good-natured, cosmopolitan place, and perhaps in some ways the best imitation of Paris that can be found (with a great originality of its own). — Henry James

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

Don’t underestimate the value of irony—it is extremely valuable. — Henry James

Oxford lends sweetness to labour and dignity to leisure. — Henry James

I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process. — Henry James

New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire. — Henry James

What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? — Henry James

It might seem that an egg which has succeeded in being fresh has done all that can reasonably be expected of it. — Henry James

Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet. — Henry James

When you forget to eat, you know you're alive. — Henry James

The "germ," wherever gathered, has ever been for me, "the germ of a story," and most of the stories strained to shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as remote and windblown as a casual hint. — Henry James

The main object of the novel is to represent life. . .The success of a work of art, to my mind, may be measured by the degree to which it produces a certain illusion; that illusion makes it appear to us for the time that we have lived another life - that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience. — Henry James

I am blackly bored when they are at large and at work; but somehow I am still more blackly bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them. — Henry James

I don't care anything about reasons, but I know what I like. — Henry James

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. — Henry James

...The peculiar air of Oxford-the air of liberty to care for the things of the mind assured and secured by machinery which is in itself a satisfaction to sense. — 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

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

I ought to tell you that I'm probably your cousin. — Henry James

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

Of course what he most intensely dreams of is being taken out on walks, and the more you are able to indulge him the more will he adore you and the more all the latent beauty of his nature will come out. — Henry James

Make the short story tremendously succinct - with a very short pulse or rhythm - and the closest selection of detail - in other words summarise intensely and deeply and keep down the lateral development. It should be a little gem of bright, quick, vivid form — Henry James

The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be . . . — Henry James

The women one meets - what are they but books one has already read? You're a library of the unknown, the uncut. Upon my word I've a subscription. — 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

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

She had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities. — Henry James

Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic. — Henry James

..her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it. — Henry James

In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons. — Henry James

Little by little, even with other cares, the slowly but surely working poison of the garden-mania begins to stir in my long-sluggish veins. — Henry James

Summer afternoon -- summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language. — Henry James

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

I don't care about anything but you, and that's enough for the present. I want you to be happy--not to think of anything sad; only to feel that I'm near you and I love you. Why should there be pain? In such hours as this what have we to do with pain? That's not the deepest thing; there's something deeper. — Henry James

It's never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools. — Henry James

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process. — Henry James

Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better. — Henry James

Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had? — 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 — Henry James

Though it might have its momentary alarms, paternity is not an exciting vocation. — Henry James

I mean that everything this afternoon has been too beautiful, and that perhaps everything together will never be so right again. I'm very glad therefore you've been a part of it. — Henry James

The practice of "reviewing"... in general has nothing in common with the art of criticism. — Henry James

When I am wicked I am in high spirits. — Henry James

You wanted to look at life for yourself - but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional. — Henry James

If we pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow him his freedom of choice , in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify. — Henry James

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

Life Lessons by Henry James

1. Henry James encourages us to take risks and be open to new experiences, as he believed that life should be lived to the fullest.
2. He also taught us to be patient and not to be discouraged by the setbacks we may face in life, as he believed that perseverance is key to success.
3. Henry James also taught us to be mindful of the power of words and to use them carefully, as he believed that words can have a lasting impact on our lives.