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

More quotes by 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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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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Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation.
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I have lived too long in foreign parts
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It is no wonder he wins every game. He has never done a thing in his life exept play games
Henry James
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No, no—there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don’t know what I don’t see—what I don’t fear!
Henry James
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We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have.
Henry James
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All roads lead to Rome, and there were times when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground.
Henry James
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Experience was to be taken as showing that one might get a five-pound note as one got a light for a cigarette but one had to check the friendly impulse to ask for it in the same way.
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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.
Henry James
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To believe in a child is to believe in the future. Through their aspirations they will save the world. With their combined knowledge the turbulent seas of hate and injustice will be calmed.
Henry James
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An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue.
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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It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.
Henry James
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Things are always different from what they might be.
Henry James
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The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.
Henry James
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There were always people to snatch at you, and it would never occur to them that they were eating you up. They did that without tasting.
Henry James
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The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy... what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be?
Henry James
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Deep experience is never peaceful.
Henry James
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In art economy is always beauty.
Henry James