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Henry James Inspirational Quotes (141)

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The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.
Henry James
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His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed.
Henry James
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I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.
Henry James
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The black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions.
Henry James
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My idea is this, that when you only love a little you're naturally not jealous — or are only jealous also a little, so that it doesn't matter. But when you love in a deeper and intenser way, then you're in the very same proportion jealous your jealousy has intensity and, no doubt, ferocity.
Henry James
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Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active when the door was not open it jumped out the window.
Henry James
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If we pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow him his freedom of choice , in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify.
Henry James
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One can't judge till one's forty before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.
Henry James
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You wanted to look at life for yourself - but you were not allowed you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional.
Henry James
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One doesn't defend one's god: one's god is in himself a defense.
Henry James
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If I should certainly say to a novice, 'Write from experience and experience only,' I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, 'Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.'
Henry James
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Art does not lie in copying nature.- Nature furnishes the material by means of which is to express a beauty still unexpressed in nature.-The artist beholds in nature more than she herself is conscious of.
Henry James
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To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that this, doubtless, is the right way to live.
Henry James
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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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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.
Henry James
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All the same don't forget that you're young — blessedly young be glad of it on the contrary and live up to it. 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.
Henry James
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What is either a picture or a novel that is not character?
Henry James
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London is on the whole the most possible form of life.
Henry James
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Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.
Henry James
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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.
Henry James
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The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself.
Henry James
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Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.
Henry James
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The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be . . .
Henry James
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One of my latest sensations was going to Lady Airlie's to hear Browning read his own poems - with the comport of finding that, at least, if you don't understand them, he himself apparently understands them even less. He read them as if he hated them and would like to bite them to pieces.
Henry James
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