Quote

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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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
Something
Forever
Way
Waiting
Time
Use
Preconceived
Life
Inspirational
Doubtless
Live
Libertarian
Without
Actual
Take
Vain
Right
Deep

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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.
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I have lived too long in foreign parts
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Art without life is a poor affair.
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It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.
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Happy you poets who can be present and so present by a simple flicker of your genius, and not, like the clumsier race, have to laya train and pile up faggots that may not after prove in the least combustible!
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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.
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When you forget to eat, you know you're alive.
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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.
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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.
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She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.
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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.
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Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
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One is oneself a fine consequence.
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It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
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Art is a point of view, and a genius way of looking at things.
Henry James
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Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.
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I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination.
Henry James
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Every governmental institution has been a standing testimony to the harmonic destiny of society, a standing proof that the life of man is destined for peace and amity, instead of disorder and contention.
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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.
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It's never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools.
Henry James