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You are good for nothing unless you are clever.

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
Good
Clever
Unless
Nothing

More quotes by Henry James

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England always seems to me like a man swimming with his clothes on his head.
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I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
Henry James
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Art without life is a poor affair.
Henry James
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I've always expected the worst, and it's always worse than I expected.
Henry James
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Everything about Florence seems to be colored with a mild violet, like diluted wine.
Henry James
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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.
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Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.
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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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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God's creature is one. He makes man, not men. His true creature is unitary and infinite, revealing himself, indeed, in every finite form, but compromised by none.
Henry James
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My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the post-mortem exploiter.
Henry James
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Things are always different than what they might be...If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.
Henry James
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In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons.
Henry James
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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.
Henry James
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The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.
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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Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
Henry James
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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
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There were always people to snatch at you, and it would never occur to them that they were eating you up. They did that without tasting.
Henry James
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London is on the whole the most possible form of life.
Henry James