Henry James Quotes

Obstacles are those frightening things you see when you take you eyes off your goal.

She had always observed that she got on better with clever women than silly ones like herself; the silly ones could never understand her wisdom; whereas the clever ones - the really clever ones - always understood her silliness.

Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness... proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures.

Try to be someone upon whom nothing is lost!

Still, who could say what men ever were looking for? They looked for what they found; they knew what pleased them only when they saw it.

You were reserved for my future

If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.

I take up my own pen again - the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. To myself - today - I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.

I'm yours for ever-for ever and ever. Here I stand; I'm as firm as a rock. If you'll only trust me, how little you'll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours.

Live all you can: it's a mistake not to. It doesn't matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?

She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.

True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get out - you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.

I don't need the aid of a clever man to teach me how to live. I can find it out for myself.

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.

Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.

It's time to start living the life you've imagined.

It has not been a successful life.'
'No - it has only been a beautiful one.

Mrs. Penniman always, even in conversation, italicised her personal pronouns.

The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.