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" 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. "

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" 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

Matter

Long

Live

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

" 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. "

" Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women. "

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

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

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

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

Henry James

His

Natural

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

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

" 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. "

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

" Life is a predicament which precedes death. "

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

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

Henry James

You

British

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

" In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land. "

" 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? "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Deep experience is never peaceful. "

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

Henry James

Charming

Meet

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

" Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there. "

" 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. "