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Until you try, you don't know what you can't do.

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
Trying

More quotes by Henry James

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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.
Henry James
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I would give all I possess to get out of myself but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.
Henry James
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The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern . . . this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.
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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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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A solitary maple on a woodside flames in single scarlet, recalls nothing so much as the daughter of a noble house dressed for a fancy ball, with the whole family gathered around to admire her before she goes.
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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It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
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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Ideas are, in truth, force.
Henry James
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It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to under value them.
Henry James
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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.
Henry James
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Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.
Henry James
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Oxford lends sweetness to labour and dignity to leisure.
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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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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Cats and monkeys monkeys and cats all human life is there.
Henry James
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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?
Henry James
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In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons.
Henry James
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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