Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
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
Better
Nothing
Good
Think
Doctor
Thinking
Clever
Doctors
Asked
Unless
More quotes by Henry James
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!
Henry James
Summer afternoon, summer afternoon to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
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
To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.
Henry James
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.
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
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
To say that she had a book is to say that her solitude did not press upon her for her love of knowledge had a fertilizing quality and her imagination was strong. There was at this time, however, a want of lightness in her situation, which the arrival of an unexpected visitor did much to dispel.
Henry James
Any point of view is interesting that is a direct impression of life. You each have an impression colored by your individual conditions make that into a picture, a picture framed by your own personal wisdom, your glimpse of the American world.
Henry James
We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosity.
Henry James
Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.
Henry James
I have lived too long in foreign parts
Henry James
I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.
Henry James
There's no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.
Henry James
..her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it.
Henry James
I am incapable of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel, I say - feel for all you're worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live.
Henry James
She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.
Henry James
All roads lead to Rome, and there were times when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground.
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
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
