Quote

We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

Henry James

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Art
Task
Give
Madness
Giving
Tasks
Work
Rest
Life
Doubt
Passion
Dark
Inspirational

More quotes by Henry James

Image
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
Image
Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
Henry James
Image
Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
Henry James
Image
Experience is never limited, and it is never complete it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.
Henry James
Image
Autobiography may be the preeminent kind of American expression.
Henry James
Image
What is either a picture or a novel that is not character?
Henry James
Image
One can't judge till one's forty before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.
Henry James
Image
If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it set to work and you will feel like it.
Henry James
Image
I have lived too long in foreign parts
Henry James
Image
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
Image
Experience is never limited, and it is never complete
Henry James
Image
It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
Henry James
Image
I could come back to America..to die..but never, never to live.
Henry James
Image
Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of 'liking' a work of art or not liking it the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test.
Henry James
Image
She is written in a foreign tongue.
Henry James
Image
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
Image
He was there or was not there: not there if I didn't see him.
Henry James
Image
In art economy is always beauty.
Henry James
Image
She envied Ralph his dying, for if one were thinking of rest that was the most perfect of all. To cease utterly, to give it all up and not know anything more — this idea was as sweet as the vision of a cool bath in a marble tank, in a darkened chamber, in a hot land.
Henry James
Image
Excellence does not require perfection.
Henry James