"One doesn't defend one's god: one's god is in himself a defense."
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Henry James quotes (page 4 of 13)
251 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet."
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"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."
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"Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance."
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"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."
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"The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life."
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"I recall my fleeting instants in Savannah as the taste of a cup charged to the brim."
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"I don't want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did."
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"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."
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"Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity."
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"Ideas are, in truth, force."
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"The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting."
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"I don’t think I pity her. She doesn’t strike me as a girl that suggests compassion. I think I envy her... I don’t know whether she is a gifted being, but she is a clever girl, with a strong will and a high temper. She has no idea of being bored...Very pretty indeed; but I don’t insist upon that. It’s her general air of being someone in particular that strikes me."
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"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."
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"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"
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"Life is a predicament which precedes death."
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"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."
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"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."
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"I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process."
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"We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have."
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