It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
Henry James

It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.
Henry James

Life is a predicament which precedes death.
Henry James

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

Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.
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.
Henry James

People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.
Henry James

Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
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.
Henry James

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
Henry James

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.
Henry James

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

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

The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.
Henry James

There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
Henry James

There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.
Henry James

Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
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.
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.
Henry James

To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.
Henry James