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Ideas are, in truth, force.

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
Learning
Force
Truth
Ideas

More quotes by Henry James

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A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.
Henry James
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She is written in a foreign tongue.
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One can't judge till one's forty before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.
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I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.
Henry James
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We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have.
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She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.
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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
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The germ, wherever gathered, has ever been for me, the germ of a story, and most of the stories strained to shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as remote and windblown as a casual hint.
Henry James
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Her chief dread in life, at this period of her development, was that she would appear narrow minded what she feared next afterwards was that she should be so.
Henry James
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A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see--that’s my idea of happiness.
Henry James
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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
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London doesn't love the latent or the lurking, has neither time, nor taste, nor sense for anything less discernible than the red flag in front of the steam-roller. It wants cash over the counter and letters ten feet high.
Henry James
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I'm yours for ever--for ever and ever. Here I stand I'm as firm as a rock. If you'll only trust me, how little you'll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours.
Henry James
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The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.
Henry James
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There's no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.
Henry James
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Art without life is a poor affair.
Henry James
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I think patriotism is like charity -- it begins at home.
Henry James
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Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
Henry James
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He was there or was not there: not there if I didn't see him.
Henry James
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Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.
Henry James