Quotes by Henry James

“Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce that it is not genteel comedy even that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundes...”

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

“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 inde...”

“It has made me better loving you... it has made me wiser, and easier, and brighter. I used to want a great many things before, and to be angry that I did not have them. Theoretically, I was satisfi...”

“I'm yours for ever--for ever and ever. Here I stand; I'm as firm as a rock. If you'll only trust me, how little you'll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours.”

“The image of the "presence," whatever it was, waiting there for him to go--this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he stopped short of the point at which certainty would have...”

“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?”

“There's no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.”

“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.”

“I never really have believed in the existence of friendship in big societies - in great towns and great crowds. It's a plant that takes time and space and air; and London society is a huge "squash"...”

“She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.”

“I should think that to hear such lovely music as that would really make him feel better."The lady gave a discriminating smile. I am afraid there are moments in life when even Beethoven has nothing ...”

“Life is a predicament which precedes death.”

“Take the word for it of a man who has made his way inch by inch, and does not believe that we'll wake up to find our work done because we've lain all night a-dreaming of it; anything worth doing is...”

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

“It's time to start living the life you've imagined.”

“People are free to find out the best and the worst of me!”

“Try to be someone upon whom nothing is lost!”

“I don't know why we livethe gift of life comes to us from I don't know what source or for what purpose; but I believe we can go on living for the reason that (always of course up to a certain point...”

“I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or to interfere with anything I do.”