Henry James
Sorrow comes in great waves...but rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us, it leaves us. And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain.Collection: Strong
She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy!Collection: Darkness
And remember this, that if you've been hated, you've also been loved.Collection: Love
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.Collection: Art
Things are always different than what they might be...If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.Collection: Waiting
There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.Collection: Two
Live all you can; it's a mistake not to.Collection: Mistake
I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination.Collection: People
Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.Collection: Character
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.Collection: Happiness
The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern . . . this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.Collection: Judging
Experience is never limited, and it is never completeCollection: Experience
Art requires, above all things, a suppression of self, a subordination of one's self to an idea.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Men
Life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection, the latter, in search of the hard latent value with which it alone is concerned, sniffs round the mass as instinctively and unerringly as a dog suspicious of some buried bone.Collection: Dog
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.Collection: Fashion
Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions.Collection: Art
We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.Collection: Past
One is oneself a fine consequence.Collection: Fine
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.Collection: Character
London is on the whole the most possible form of life.Collection: London
Her chief dread in life, at this period of her development, was that she would appear narrow minded; what she feared next afterwards was that she should be so.Collection: Development
... since she might not be splendid, she would at least be immaculate.Collection: Might
Live as you like best, and your character will take care of itself. Most things are good for you; the exceptions are very rare.Collection: Character
England always seems to me like a man swimming with his clothes on his head.Collection: Swimming
The girl had a certain nobleness of imagination, which rendered her a good many services and played her a great many tricks. She spent half her time in thinking of beauty, bravery, magnanimity; she had a fixed determination to regard the world as a place of brightness, of free expansion, of irresistible action, she thought it would be detestable to be afraid or ashamed. She had an infinite hope that she would never do anything wrong. She had resented so strongly, after discovering them, her mere errors of feeling.Collection: Girl
I always want to know the things one shouldn't do." "So as to do them?" asked her aunt. "So as to choose." said IsabelCollection: Aunt
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.Collection: Brother
...and the great advantage of being a literary woman, was that you could go everywhere and do everything.Collection: Advantage
My idea is this, that when you only love a little you're naturally not jealous — or are only jealous also a little, so that it doesn't matter. But when you love in a deeper and intenser way, then you're in the very same proportion jealous; your jealousy has intensity and, no doubt, ferocity.Collection: Jealous
...The peculiar air of Oxford-the air of liberty to care for the things of the mind assured and secured by machinery which is in itself a satisfaction to sense.Collection: Air
A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see--that’s my idea of happiness.Collection: Horse
I ought to tell you that I'm probably your cousin.Collection: Cousin
He valued life and literature equally for the light they threw upon each other; to his mind one implied the other; he was unable to conceive of them apart.Collection: Light
I recall my fleeting instants in Savannah as the taste of a cup charged to the brim.Collection: Taste
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.Collection: Character
He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.Collection: Beautiful
We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have.Collection: Dark
If you haven't had your life what have you had?Collection: Havens
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.Collection: Struggle
The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.Collection: Book
I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.Collection: Creating Art
Don't pass it by - the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist's that it waits for.Collection: Real
Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better.Collection: Ideas
She had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.Collection: Mistake
It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent.Collection: Cheerful
Instead of leading to the high places of happiness, from which the world would seem to lie below one, so that one could look down with a sense of exaltation and advantage, and judge and choose and pity, it led rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and depression, where the sound of other lives, easier and freer, was heard as from above, and served to deepen the feeling of failure.Collection: Lying
Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.Collection: Art
I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.Collection: Thinking