Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Certain
Mood
Aesthetics
Feels
Sin
Starving
Things
Pure
Gross
World
Beauty
Appetite
Turns
Protest
Half
Enter
Tacit
Away
Impulse
Sinning
Beautiful
Useless
Moods

More quotes by Henry James

Image
I am blackly bored when they are at large and at work but somehow I am still more blackly bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them.
Henry James
Image
The black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions.
Henry James
Image
Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
Henry James
Image
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
Image
A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.
Henry James
Image
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
Image
Novelist-Citizen of Two Countries Interpreter of his Generation on both Sides of the Sea.
Henry James
Image
I have lived too long in foreign parts
Henry James
Image
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.
Henry James
Image
Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active when the door was not open it jumped out the window.
Henry James
Image
I could come back to America..to die..but never, never to live.
Henry James
Image
His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed.
Henry James
Image
What is either a picture or a novel that is not character?
Henry James
Image
In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons.
Henry James
Image
Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.
Henry James
Image
The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.
Henry James
Image
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
Henry James
Image
The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be . . .
Henry James
Image
One doesn't defend one's god: one's god is in himself a defense.
Henry James
Image
She envied Ralph his dying, for if one were thinking of rest that was the most perfect of all. To cease utterly, to give it all up and not know anything more — this idea was as sweet as the vision of a cool bath in a marble tank, in a darkened chamber, in a hot land.
Henry James