"The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself."
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Quote collection
Henry James quotes (page 3 of 13)
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"There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition."
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"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."
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"A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see--that’s my idea of happiness."
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"Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize."
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"His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed."
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"The critical sense is so far from frequent that it is absolutely rare, and the possession of the cluster of qualities that minister to it is one of the highest distinctions... In this light one sees the critic as the real helper of the artist, a torchbearing outrider, the interpreter, the brother... Just in proportion as he is sentient and restless, just in proportion as he reacts and reciprocates and penetrates, is the critic a valuable instrument."
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"Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there."
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"Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women."
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"In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives."
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"Experience is never limited, and it is never complete"
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"A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it."
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"Things are always different from what they might be."
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"Don't pass it by - the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist's that it waits for."
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"A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals."
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"It is no wonder he wins every game. He has never done a thing in his life exept play games"
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"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."
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"Writing is not primarily escape, but use."
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"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."
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"Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history."
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