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" 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

Only

Worth

Talent

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" Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. "

" 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. "

" It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature. "

" I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme. "

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

" 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 favor of doing it. "

" 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. "

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

" I adore adverbs; they are the only qualifications I really much respect. "

" An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue. "

Henry James

His

Natural

" Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself. "

" 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. "

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

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

" Deep experience is never peaceful. "

" Ideas are, in truth, force. "

" 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. "

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

" It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to under value them. "

" A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals. "

" 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? "

" 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

Conscience

Nice

" 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. "

" What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? "

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

" However British you may be, I am more British still. "

Henry James

You

British

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

" 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. "