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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
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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
Unless
Better
Nothing
Good
Think
Doctor
Thinking
Clever
Doctors
Asked
More quotes by Henry James
Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
Henry James
The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.
Henry James
I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.
Henry James
Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
Henry James
Things are always different than what they might be...If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.
Henry James
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
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
Little by little, even with other cares, the slowly but surely working poison of the garden-mania begins to stir in my long-sluggish veins.
Henry James
The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be . . .
Henry James
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
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
Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active when the door was not open it jumped out the window.
Henry James
Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.
Henry James
Deep experience is never peaceful.
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
The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.
Henry James
My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the post-mortem exploiter.
Henry James
London is on the whole the most possible form of life.
Henry James
One of my latest sensations was going to Lady Airlie's to hear Browning read his own poems - with the comport of finding that, at least, if you don't understand them, he himself apparently understands them even less. He read them as if he hated them and would like to bite them to pieces.
Henry James
The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the Anglo-Saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big bayad?re of journalism, of the newspaper and the picture magazine which keeps screaming, Look at me. Illustrations, loud simplifications... bill poster advertising ? only these stand a chance.
Henry James
