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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.

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
Process
Substitutes
Makes
Application
Consideration
Art
Importance
Things
Beauty
Life
Interest
Whatever
Force
Substitute

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If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it set to work and you will feel like it.
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It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
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One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.
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Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.
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London is on the whole the most possible form of life.
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One doesn't defend one's god: one's god is in himself a defense.
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..her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it.
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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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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.
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I intend to judge things for myself to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.
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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.
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Ideas are, in truth, force.
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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.
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To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that this, doubtless, is the right way to live.
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The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.
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To say that she had a book is to say that her solitude did not press upon her for her love of knowledge had a fertilizing quality and her imagination was strong. There was at this time, however, a want of lightness in her situation, which the arrival of an unexpected visitor did much to dispel.
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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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If you haven't had your life what have you had?
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Every governmental institution has been a standing testimony to the harmonic destiny of society, a standing proof that the life of man is destined for peace and amity, instead of disorder and contention.
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What is either a picture or a novel that is not character?
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