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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
Better
Nothing
Good
Think
Doctor
Thinking
Clever
Doctors
Asked
Unless

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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.
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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!
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I've always expected the worst, and it's always worse than I expected.
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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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Things are always different than what they might be...If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.
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A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.
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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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It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
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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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Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
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Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active when the door was not open it jumped out the window.
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I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.
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The black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions.
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London is on the whole the most possible form of life.
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