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I think patriotism is like charity -- it begins at home.

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
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Patriot
Patriotic
Patriotism
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Charity

More quotes by 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.
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Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!
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If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?
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If I should certainly say to a novice, 'Write from experience and experience only,' I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, 'Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.'
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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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We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have.
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I've always expected the worst, and it's always worse than I expected.
Henry James
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You think too much.' 'I suppose I do but I can’t help it, my mind is so terribly active. When I give myself, I give myself. I pay the penalty in my headaches, my famous headaches--a perfect circlet of pain! But I carry it as a queen carries her crown.
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It's never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools.
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We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosity.
Henry James
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I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination.
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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.
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Oxford lends sweetness to labour and dignity to leisure.
Henry James
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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
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There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.
Henry James
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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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Excellence does not require perfection.
Henry James
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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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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.
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Art does not lie in copying nature.- Nature furnishes the material by means of which is to express a beauty still unexpressed in nature.-The artist beholds in nature more than she herself is conscious of.
Henry James