Henry James

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 airborne particle in its tissue.

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

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.

It's time to start living the life you've imagined.

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.

There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful useless things.

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

Summer afternoon - Summer afternoon... the two most beautiful words in the English language.

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

She had an unequalled gift... of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.

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 are in a conspiracy to under-value them.

She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.