Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

- Henry James

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

- Henry James

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.

- Henry James

I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them.

- Henry James

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.

- Henry James

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.

- Henry James

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

- Henry James

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

- Henry James

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

- Henry James

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

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

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

- Henry James

The only success worth one's power 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

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

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.

- Henry James

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.

- Henry James