Henry James Quotes

...one should try to be one's own best friend and to give one's self, in this manner, distinguished company.

My envy's not dangerous; it wouldn't hurt a mouse.

What should one do with the misery of the world in a scheme of the agreeable for one's self?

We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.

Everything about Florence seems to be coloured with a mild violet, like diluted wine.

She gazed and wondered, like a child or peasant, and paid her silent tribute to visible grandeur.

She knew that this silent, motionless portal opened into the street; if the sidelights had not been filled with green paper, she might have looked out on the little brown stoop and the well-worn brick pavement. But she had no wish to look out, for this would have interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side — a place which became, to the child’s imagination, according to its different moods, a region of delight or terror.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

When it's for each other that people give things up they don't miss them.

The fatal futility of Fact.

I don't need the aid of a clever man to teach me how to live. I can find it out for myself.

There’s no way to do that, Miss Archer. I won’t say that if you refuse me you’ll kill me; I shall not die of it. But I shall do worse; I shall live to no purpose.

There are few things more exciting to me, in short, than a psychological reason.

Deep experience is never peaceful.

Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints.