"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

"It has made me better loving you...it has made me wiser, and easier, and brighter. I used to want a great many things before, and to be angry that I did not have them. Theoretically, I was satisfied. I flattered myself that I had limited my wants. But I was subject to irritation; I used to have morbid sterile hateful fits of hunger, of desire. Now I really am satisfied, because I can’t think of anything better. It’s just as when one has been trying to spell out a book in the twilight, and suddenly the lamp comes in. I had been putting out my eyes over the book of life, and finding nothing to reward me for my pains; but now that I can read it properly I see that it’s a delightful story."
— Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady)

"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."
— Henry James

"Summer afternoon... to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language."
— Henry James

"I always want to know the things one shouldn't do."
"So as to do them?" asked her aunt.
"So as to choose." said Isabel"
— Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady)

"She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS."
— Henry James

"Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic."
— Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady)

"If this was love, love had been overrated."
— Henry James (The Europeans)

"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?"
— Henry James (The Ambassadors)

"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."
— Henry James

"Don't pass it by--the immediate, the real, the only, the yours."
— Henry James

"Never say you know the last word about any human heart."
— Henry James

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

"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. When however you love in the most abysmal and unutterable way of all – whey then you’re beyond everything, and nothing can pull you down."
— Henry James (The Golden Bowl)

"Try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost."
— Henry James

"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."
— Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady)

"Things are always different than what they might be...If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything."
— Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady)

"You wanted to look at life for yourself - but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional."
— Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady)

"Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it."
— Henry James

"Be not afraid of life believe that life is worth living and your belief will create the fact."
— Henry James

"When I am wicked I am in high spirits."
— Henry James (The Europeans)

"...and the great advantage of being a literary woman, was that you could go everywhere and do everything."
— Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady)

"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

"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? … I haven’t done so enough before—and now I'm too old; too old at any rate for what I see. … What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. … Still, we have the illusion of freedom; therefore don't be, like me, without the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it; I don’t quite know which. Of course at present I'm a case of reaction against the mistake. … Do what you like so long as you don't make my mistake. For it was a mistake. Live!"
— Henry James (The Ambassadors)

"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."
— Henry James

"I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all."
— Henry James

"I don't care about anything but you, and that's enough for the present. I want you to be happy--not to think of anything sad; only to feel that I'm near you and I love you. Why should there be pain? In such hours as this what have we to do with pain? That's not the deepest thing; there's something deeper."
— Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady)

"I don't want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did."
— Henry James

"She had an unequalled gift, usually pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into opportunities."
— Henry James

"Observe perpetually!"
— Henry James

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

"She is written in a foreign tongue."
— Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady)

"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."
— Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady)

"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."
— Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady)

"...he had long decided that abundant laughter should be the embellishment of the remainder of his days."
— Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady)

"Life is a predicament which precedes death."
— Henry James

"Her memory's your love. You want no other."
— Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)

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

"It's time to start living the life you've imagined."
— Henry James

"To say that she had a book is to say that her solitude did not press upon her; for her love of knowledge had a fertilizing quality and her imagination was strong. There was at this time, however, a want of lightness in her situation, which the arrival of an unexpected visitor did much to dispel."
— Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady)

"It wouldn't be the first time she had seen herself obliged to accept with smothered irony other people's interpretation of her conduct. She often ended by giving up to them --it seemed really the way to live --the version that met their convenience."
— Henry James

"She knew that this silent, motionless portal opened into the street; if the sidelights had not been filled with green paper, she might have looked out on the little brown stoop and the well-worn brick pavement. But she had no wish to look out, for this would have interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side--a place which became, to the child’s imagination, according to its different moods, a region of delight or terror."
— Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady)

"She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering."
— Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady)

"I don’t think I pity her. She doesn’t strike me as a girl that suggests compassion. I think I envy her... I don’t know whether she is a gifted being, but she is a clever girl, with a strong will and a high temper. She has no idea of being bored...Very pretty indeed; but I don’t insist upon that. It’s her general air of being someone in particular that strikes me."
— Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady)

"She was a young person of many theories; her imagination was remarkably active. It had been her fortune to possess a finer mind than most of the persons among whom her lot was cast; to have a larger perception of surrounding facts, and to care for knowledge that was tinged with the unfamiliar...It may be affirmed without delay that She was probably very liable to the sin of self-esteem; she often surveyed with complacency the field of her own nature; she was in the habit of taking for granted, on scanty evidence, that she was right; impulsively, she often admired herself...Every now and then she found out she was wrong, and then she treated herself to a week of passionate humility. After this she held her head higher than ever again; for it was of no use, she had an unquenchable desire to think well of herself. She had a theory that it was only on this condition that life was worth living; that one should be one of the best, should be conscious of a fine organization, should move in the realm of light, of natural wisdom, of happy impulse, of inspiration gracefully chronic."
— Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady)

"Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she should find herself in a difficult position, so that she might have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded."
— Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady)

"I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favour of doing it."
— Henry James

"If one is strong, one loves the more strongly."
— Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady)

"It is enough to say that her perception of the endless interest of the place was such as might have been expected in a young woman of her intelligence and culture. She had always been fond of history, and here was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine. She had an imagination that kindled at the mention of great deeds, and wherever she turned some great deed had been acted. These things excited her but they had been quietly excited... To her own knowledge she was very happy; she would have even been willing to believe that these were to be on the whole the happiest hours of her life. The sense of mighty human past was upon her, but it was interfused in the strangest, suddenest, most capricious way, with fresh cool breath of the future. Her feelings were so mingled that she scarcely knew whither any of them would lead her, and she went about in a kind of repressed ecstasy of contemplation, seeing often in the things she looked at a great deal more than was there."
— Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady)

"Obstacles are those frightening things you see when you take you eyes off your goal."
— Henry James