Henry James

• "I think I don't regret a single 'excess' of my responsive youth - I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.“
• "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.“
• "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.“
• "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.“
• "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.“
• "In art economy is always beauty.“
• "Life is a predicament which precedes death.“
• "Deep experience is never peaceful.“
• "Experience is never limited, and it is never complete it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.“
• "It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.“
• "It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.“
• "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.“
• "Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.“
• "I adore adverbs they are the only qualifications I really much respect.“
• "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?“
• "Ideas are, in truth, force.“
• "A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.“
• "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.“

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