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Identity
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The terrible fluidity of self-revelation.
-Henry James
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Judging, Judgment
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Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
-Henry James
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Kindness
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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
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Life
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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
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Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
-Henry James
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Men & Women
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The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.
-Henry James
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Mistakes
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Greville Fane's French and Italian were droll; the imitative faculty had been denied her, and she had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities. She knew it, but she didn't care; correctness was the virtue in the world that, like her heroes and heroines, she valued least.
-Henry James, Greville Fane from The Real Thing: and Other Tales (1893)
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Money
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Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.
-Henry James
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Museums, Galleries
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In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.
-Henry James
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Patriotism
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I think patriotism is like charity -- it begins at home.
-Henry James
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Potential
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Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
-Henry James
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Praise
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What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise -- although the philosophers generally call it recognition!
-Henry James, Letter to philosopher Henri Bergson (published in The Letters of William James, vol. 2, 1920), June 13, 1907
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Reading
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He had dropped upon a seat halfway down the nave and, again in the museum mood, was trying with head thrown back and eyes aloft, to reconstitute a past, to reduce it in fact to the convenient terms of Victor Hugo, whom, a few days before, giving the rein for once in a way to the joy of life, he had purchased in seventy bound volumes, a miracle of cheapness, parted with, he was assured by the shopman, at the price of the red-and-gold alone. He looked, doubtless, while he played his eternal nippers over Gothic glooms, sufficiently rapt in reverence; but what his thought had finally bumped against was the question of where, among packed accumulations, so multiform a wedge would be able to enter..
-Henry James, The Ambassadors, 1909
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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.
-Henry James
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Reason
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To read between the lines was easier than to follow the text.
-Henry James
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Seasons
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Summer afternoon -- summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
-Henry James
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Simplicity
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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
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Tact, Tactfulness
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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
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Teaching
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To believe in a child is to believe in the future. Through their aspirations they will save the world. With their combined knowledge the turbulent seas of hate and injustice will be calmed. They will champion the causes of life's underdogs, forging a society without class discrimination. They will supply humanity with music and beauty as it has never known. They will endure. Towards these ends I pledge my life's work. I will supply the children with tools and knowledge to overcome the obstacles. I will pass on the wisdom of my years and temper it with patience. I shall impact in each child the desire to fulfill his or her dream. I shall teach.
-Henry James
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Theater
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To treat a big subject in the intensely summarized fashion demanded by an evening's traffic of the stage when the evening, freely clipped at each end, is reduced to two hours and a half, is a feat of which the difficulty looms large.
-Henry James
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Travel
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Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
-Henry James
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Understanding
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A man who pretends to understand women is ad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.
-Henry James
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Women
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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
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Books by and about Henry James