Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.
Henry James
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Henry James
Age: 73 †
Born: 1843
Born: January 1
Died: 1916
Died: January 1
Contributing Editor
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet Lawyer
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
New York City
New York
Henricus James
Life
Civilization
Wonder
High
Enumerate
American
Texture
Left
Items
Become
Absent
Might
Exists
Country
Countries
More quotes by Henry James
Summer afternoon, summer afternoon to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
Henry James
My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the post-mortem exploiter.
Henry James
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
Things are always different from what they might be.
Henry James
There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful useless things.
Henry James
I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
Henry James
A solitary maple on a woodside flames in single scarlet, recalls nothing so much as the daughter of a noble house dressed for a fancy ball, with the whole family gathered around to admire her before she goes.
Henry James
In art economy is always beauty.
Henry James
If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?
Henry James
I adore adverbs they are the only qualifications I really much respect.
Henry James
do you think it is better to be clever than to be good?” “Good for what?” asked the Doctor. “You are good for nothing unless you are clever.
Henry James
One doesn't defend one's god: one's god is in himself a defense.
Henry James
I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination.
Henry James
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
It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
Henry James
London is on the whole the most possible form of life.
Henry James
Experience is never limited, and it is never complete it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.
Henry James
Little by little, even with other cares, the slowly but surely working poison of the garden-mania begins to stir in my long-sluggish veins.
Henry James
There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.
Henry James
Always keep a window in the attic open not just cracked: open.
Henry James