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Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of 'liking' a work of art or not liking it the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test.

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
Ever
Tests
Nothing
Criticism
Take
Ultimate
Work
Fashion
Liking
Good
Courses
Abolish
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Improved
Art
Primitive
Place
Test

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You think too much.' 'I suppose I do but I can’t help it, my mind is so terribly active. When I give myself, I give myself. I pay the penalty in my headaches, my famous headaches--a perfect circlet of pain! But I carry it as a queen carries her crown.
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I intend to judge things for myself to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.
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Experience is never limited, and it is never complete
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Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.
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A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.
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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.
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It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.
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Her memory's your love. You want no other.
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You must save what you can of your life you musn't lose it all simply because you've lost a part.
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Always keep a window in the attic open not just cracked: open.
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We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have.
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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.
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There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.
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You are good for nothing unless you are clever.
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I've always expected the worst, and it's always worse than I expected.
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When you forget to eat, you know you're alive.
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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.
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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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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.
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To read between the lines was easier than to follow the text.
Henry James