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Excellence does not require perfection.
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
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Writer
New York City
New York
Henricus James
Require
Excellence
Perfection
Doe
More quotes by Henry James
The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality.
Henry James
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
We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have.
Henry James
Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.
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
London is on the whole the most possible form of life.
Henry James
Art without life is a poor affair.
Henry James
Until you try, you don't know what you can't do.
Henry James
Women never dine alone. When they dine alone they don't dine.
Henry James
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
I would give all I possess to get out of myself but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.
Henry James
When you forget to eat, you know you're alive.
Henry James
There's no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.
Henry James
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
In art economy is always beauty.
Henry James
A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.
Henry James
She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.
Henry James
The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern . . . this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.
Henry James
The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself.
Henry James
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
