QUOTES by Henry James
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Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!
Quote by -Henry James
We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donn´e: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.
Quote by -Henry James
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.
Quote by -Henry James
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.
Quote by -Henry James
The practice of "reviewing"... in general has nothing in common with the art of criticism.
Quote by -Henry James
The effect, if not the prime office, of criticism is to make our absorption and our enjoyment of the things that feed the mind as aware of itself as possible, since that awareness quickens the mental demand, which thus in turn wanders further and further for pasture. This action on the part of the mind practically amounts to a reaching out for the reasons of its interest, as only by its ascertaining them can the interest grow more various. This is the very education of our imaginative life.
Quote by -Henry James
To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.
Quote by -Henry James
No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches no great Universities nor public schools -- no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class -- no Epsom nor Ascot Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American life.
Quote by -Henry James
Novelist-Citizen of Two Countries Interpreter of his Generation on both Sides of the Sea.
Quote by -Henry James
She carried within herself a great fund of life, and her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movement of her own heart and the agitations of the world. For this reason, she was fond of seeing great crowds, and large stretches of country, of reading about revolutions and wars, of looking at historical pictures--a class of efforts to which she had often gone so far as to forgive much bad painting for the sake of the subject.
Quote by -Henry James
It had been agreed between them that lighted candles at wayside inns, in strange countries amid mountain scenery, gave the evening meal a peculiar poetry.
Quote by -Henry James
The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it-this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education.
Quote by -Henry James
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.
Quote by -Henry James
The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.
Quote by -Henry James
Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
Quote by -Henry James
Live as you like best, and your character will take care of itself. Most things are good for you; the exceptions are very rare.
Quote by -Henry James
Don't try so much to form your character - it's like trying to pull open a tight, tender young rose. Live as you like best and your character will take care of itself.
Quote by -Henry James
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.
Quote by -Henry James
She had her own way of doing all that she did, and this is the simplest description of a character which, although by no means without liberal motions, rarely succeeded in giving an impression of suavity.
Quote by -Henry James
What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?
Quote by -Henry James
The critical sense is so far from frequent that it is absolutely rare, and the possession of the cluster of qualities that minister to it is one of the highest distinctions... In this light one sees the critic as the real helper of the artist, a torchbearing outrider, the interpreter, the brother... Just in proportion as he is sentient and restless, just in proportion as he reacts and reciprocates and penetrates, is the critic a valuable instrument.
Quote by -Henry James
We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donn´e: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.
Quote by -Henry James
Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.
Quote by -Henry James
If we pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow him his freedom of choice , in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify.
Quote by -Henry James
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?
Quote by -Henry James
The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.
Quote by -Henry James
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.
Quote by -Henry James
The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself.
Quote by -Henry James
You seemed to me to be soaring far up in the blue - to be sailing in the bright light, over the heads of men. Suddenly some one tosses up a faded rosebud - a missile that should never have reached you - and down you drop to the ground.
Quote by -Henry James
God's creature is one. He makes man, not men. His true creature is unitary and infinite, revealing himself, indeed, in every finite form, but compromised by none.
Quote by -Henry James
The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.
Quote by -Henry James
Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women.
Quote by -Henry James
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.
Quote by -Henry James
...I am incapable of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel, I say - feel for all you're worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live...
Quote by -Henry James
Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
Quote by -Henry James
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance... and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
Quote by -Henry James
We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
Quote by -Henry James
There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
Quote by -Henry James
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.
Quote by -Henry James
The deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer...No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind.
Quote by -Henry James
Make him [the reader] think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications.
Quote by -Henry James