Background Image

...

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

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

The Only Success Worth

Henry James

...

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?

Views: 10

Topic

Congratulations

More From 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.

The Only Reason For The Existence Of A Novel Is That It Does Attempt To Represent Life.

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.

Be Generous, Be Delicate, And Always Pursue The Prize.

Life Is A Predicament Which Precedes Death.

When I Am Wicked I Am In High Spirits.

We Are Divided Of Course Between Liking To Feel The Past Strange And Liking To Feel It Familiar.

We Care What Happens To People Only In Proportion As We Know What People Are.

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.

Though There Are Some Disagreeable Things In Venice There Is Nothing So Disagreeable As The Visitors.

Criticism Talks A Good Deal Of Nonsense, But Even Its Nonsense Is A Useful Force. It Keeps The Question Of Art Before The World, Insists Upon Its Importance.

...he Had Long Decided That Abundant Laughter Should Be The Embellishment Of The Remainder Of His Days.

In A Play, Certainly, The Subject Is Of More Importance Than In Any Other Work Of Art. Infelicity, Triviality, Vagueness Of Subject, May Be Outweighed In A Poem, A Novel, Or A Picture, By Charm Of Manner, By Ingenuity Of Execution; But In A Drama The Subject Is Of The Essence Of The Work-it Is The Work. If It Is Feeble, The Work Can Have No Force; If It Is Shapeless, The Work Must Be Amorphous.

Every Good Story Is Of Course Both A Picture And An Idea, And The More They Are Interfused The Better.

...the Peculiar Air Of Oxford-the Air Of Liberty To Care For The Things Of The Mind Assured And Secured By Machinery Which Is In Itself A Satisfaction To Sense.

Do Not Mind Anything That Anyone Tells You About Anyone Else. Judge Everyone And Everything For Yourself.

It Exhibits The Effort Of An Essentially Prosaic Mind To Lift Itself, By A Prolonged Muscular Strain, Into Poetry.

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.

Which Of You With Taking Thought Can Add To His Stature One Cubit?

What Is Either A Picture Or A Novel That Is Not Character?

Things Are Always Different From What They Might Be.

Ideas Are, In Truth, Forces. Infinite, Too, Is The Power Of Personality. A Union Of The Two Always Makes History.

Make Him [the Reader] Think The Evil, Make Him Think It For Himself, And You Are Released From Weak Specifications.

I Would Give All I Possess To Get Out Of Myself; But Somehow, At The End, I Find Myself So Vastly More Interesting Than Nine Tenths Of The People I Meet.

Art Requires, Above All Things, A Suppression Of Self, A Subordination Of One's Self To An Idea.

It Takes An Endless Amount Of History To Make Even A Little Tradition.

No, No—there Are Depths, Depths! The More I Go Over It, The More I See In It, And The More I See In It, The More I Fear. I Don’t Know What I Don’t See—what I Don’t Fear!

Of Course What He Most Intensely Dreams Of Is Being Taken Out On Walks, And The More You Are Able To Indulge Him The More Will He Adore You And The More All The Latent Beauty Of His Nature Will Come Out.

You Must Save What You Can Of Your Life; You Musn't Lose It All Simply Because You've Lost A Part.

I Have Only To Let Myself Go! So I Have Said All My Life, Yet I Have Never Fully Done It.

She Took Refuge On The Firm Ground Of Fiction, Through Which Indeed There Curled The Blue River Of Truth.

What Is Character But The Determination Of Incident? What Is Incident But The Illustration Of Character?

The "germ," Wherever Gathered, Has Ever Been For Me, "the Germ Of A Story," And Most Of The Stories Strained To Shape Under My Hand Have Sprung From A Single Small Seed, A Seed As Remote And Windblown As A Casual Hint.

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.

She Had Always Been Fond Of History, And Here [in Rome] Was History In The Stones Of The Street And The Atoms Of The Sunshine.

She Had A Certain Way Of Looking At Life Which He Took As A Personal Offense.

I Don't Care Anything About Reasons, But I Know What I Like.

I Could Come Back To America..to Die..but Never, Never To Live.

The House Of Fiction Has In Short Not One Window, But A Million, ... But They Are, Singly, As Nothing Without The Posted Presence Of The Watcher.

I Hold Any Writer Sufficiently Justified Who Is Himself In Love With His Theme.

Little By Little, Even With Other Cares, The Slowly But Surely Working Poison Of The Garden-mania Begins To Stir In My Long-sluggish Veins.

All Roads Lead To Rome, And There Were Times When It Might Have Struck Us That Almost Every Branch Of Study Or Subject Of Conversation Skirted Forbidden Ground.

One Of My Latest Sensations Was Going To Lady Airlie's To Hear Browning Read His Own Poems - With The Comport Of Finding That, At Least, If You Don't Understand Them, He Himself Apparently Understands Them Even Less. He Read Them As If He Hated Them And Would Like To Bite Them To Pieces.

Her Imagination Was By Habit Ridiculously Active; When The Door Was Not Open It Jumped Out The Window.

It's A Complex Fate, Being An American, And One Of The Responsibilities It Entails Is Fighting Against A Superstitious Valuation Of Europe.

A Man Who Pretends To Understand Women Is Bad Manners. For Him To Really To Understand Them Is Bad Morals.

To Kill A Human Being Is, After All, The Least Injury You Can Do Him.

Don't Pass It By - The Immediate, The Real, The Ours, The Yours, The Novelist's That It Waits For.

It's Time To Start Living The Life You've Imagined.

Make (the Reader) Think The Evil, Make Him Think It For Himself, And You Are Released From Weak Specifications. My Values Are Positively All Blanks, Save So Far As An Excited Horror, A Promoted Pity, A Created Expertness... Proceed To Read Into Them More Or Less Fantastic Figures.

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 Had An Excellent Repast - The Best Repast Possible - Which Consisted Simply Of Boiled Eggs And Bread And Butter. It Was The Quality Of These Simple Ingredients That Made The Occasion Memorable. The Eggs Were So Good That I Am Ashamed To Say How Many Of Them I Consumed ....it Might Seem That An Egg Which Has Succeeded In Being Fresh Has Done All That Can Be Reasonably Expected Of It.

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.

The Women One Meets - What Are They But Books One Has Already Read? You're A Library Of The Unknown, The Uncut. Upon My Word I've A Subscription.

People Can Be In General Pretty Well Trusted, Of Course--with The Clock Of Their Freedom Ticking As Loud As It Seems To Do Here--to Keep An Eye On The Fleeting Hour.

I Am Incapable Of Telling You Not To Feel. Feel, Feel, I Say - Feel For All You're Worth, And Even If It Half Kills You, For That Is The Only Way To Live.

Autobiography May Be The Preeminent Kind Of American Expression.

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.

Try To Be One Of The People On Whom Nothing Is Lost!

Summer Afternoon, Summer Afternoon; To Me Those Have Always Been The Two Most Beautiful Words In The English Language.

Americans Will Eat Garbage Provided You Sprinkle It Liberally With Ketchup.

The Power To Guess The Unseen From The Seen, To Trace The Implication Of Things, To Judge The Whole Piece By The Pattern, The Condition Of Feeling Life, In General, So Completely That You Are Well On Your Way To Knowing Any Particular Corner Of It-this Cluster Of Gifts May Almost Be Said To Constitute Experience, And They Occur In Country And In Town, And In The Most Differing Stages Of Education.

Take The Word For It Of A Man Who Has Made His Way Inch By Inch, And Does Not Believe That We'll Wake Up To Find Our Work Done Because We've Lain All Night A-dreaming Of It; Anything Worth Doing Is Devilish Hard To Do!

Art Is A Point Of View, And A Genius Way Of Looking At Things.

The Image Of The Presence, Whatever It Was, Waiting There For Him To Go -this Image Had Not Yet Been So Concrete For His Nerves As When He Stopped Short Of The Point At Which Certainty Would Have Come To Him. For, With All His Resolution, Or More Exactly With All His Dread, He Did Stop Short - He Hung Back From Really Seeing. The Risk Was Too Great And His Fear Too Definite: It Took At This Moment An Awful Specific Form.

If One Is Strong, One Loves The More Strongly.

There Are Women Who Are For All Your 'times Of Life.' They're The Most Wonderful Sort.

There Were Always People To Snatch At You, And It Would Never Occur To Them That They Were Eating You Up. They Did That Without Tasting.

London Is On The Whole The Most Possible Form Of Life.

The Girl Had A Certain Nobleness Of Imagination, Which Rendered Her A Good Many Services And Played Her A Great Many Tricks.

We Must For Dear Life Make Our Own Counter-realities.

In Art Economy Is Always Beauty.

Art Is Nothing More Than The Shadow Of Humanity.

Inspirational Running

Adjectives Are The Sugar Of Literature And Adverbs The Salt.

He Valued Life And Literature Equally For The Light They Threw Upon Each Other; To His Mind One Implied The Other; He Was Unable To Conceive Of Them Apart.

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.

Life Being All Inclusion And Confusion, And Art Being All Discrimination And Selection, The Latter, In Search Of The Hard Latent Value With Which It Alone Is Concerned, Sniffs Round The Mass As Instinctively And Unerringly As A Dog Suspicious Of Some Buried Bone.

Though It Might Have Its Momentary Alarms, Paternity Is Not An Exciting Vocation.

Am I Solemn? I Had An Idea I Was Grinning From Ear To Ear." "you Look As If You Were Taking Me To A Prayer-meeting Or A Funeral. If That's A Grin Your Ears Are Very Near Together." "should You Like Me To Dance A Hornpipe On The Deck?" "pray Do, And I'll Carry Round Your Hat. It'll Pay The Expenses Of Our Journey.

I Mean That Everything This Afternoon Has Been Too Beautiful, And That Perhaps Everything Together Will Never Be So Right Again. I'm Very Glad Therefore You've Been A Part Of It.

I Recall My Fleeting Instants In Savannah As The Taste Of A Cup Charged To The Brim.

You Think Too Much.' 'i Suppose I Do; But I Can’t Help It, My Mind Is So Terribly Active. When I Give Myself, I Give Myself. I Pay The Penalty In My Headaches, My Famous Headaches--a Perfect Circlet Of Pain! But I Carry It As A Queen Carries Her Crown.

A Solitary Maple On A Woodside Flames In Single Scarlet, Recalls Nothing So Much As The Daughter Of A Noble House Dressed For A Fancy Ball, With The Whole Family Gathered Around To Admire Her Before She Goes.

London Doesn't Love The Latent Or The Lurking, Has Neither Time, Nor Taste, Nor Sense For Anything Less Discernible Than The Red Flag In Front Of The Steam-roller. It Wants Cash Over The Counter And Letters Ten Feet High.

I've Always Expected The Worst, And It's Always Worse Than I Expected.

If The Artist Is Necessarily Sensitive, Does That Sensitiveness Form In Its Essence A State Constantly Liable To Shade Off Into The Morbid? Does This Liability, Moreover, Increase In Proportion As The Effort Is Great And The Ambition Intense?

She Envied Ralph His Dying, For If One Were Thinking Of Rest That Was The Most Perfect Of All. To Cease Utterly, To Give It All Up And Not Know Anything More — This Idea Was As Sweet As The Vision Of A Cool Bath In A Marble Tank, In A Darkened Chamber, In A Hot Land.

She Feels In Italics And Thinks In Capitals.

I Have Lived Too Long In Foreign Parts

It Doesn't So Much Matter What You Do In Particular, So Long As You Have Your Life.

...the Great Merit Of The Place Is That One Can Arrange One's Life Here Exactly As One Pleases...there Are Facilities For Every Kind Of Habit And Taste, And Everything Is Accepted And Understood.

Art Derives A Considerable Part Of Its Beneficial Exercise From Flying In The Face Of Presumptions.

It Takes A Great Deal Of History To Produce A Little Literature.

She Had An Immense Curiosity About Life, And Was Constantly Staring And Wondering.

The Only Obligation To Which In Advance We May Hold A Novel, Without Incurring The Accusation Of Being Arbitrary, Is That It Be Interesting.

I Have Performed The Necessary Butchery. Here Is The Bleeding Corpse.

In Museums And Palaces We Are Alternate Radicals And Conservatives.

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.

That Accurst Autobiographic Form Which Puts A Premium On The Loose, The Improvised, The Cheap, And The Easy.

No Themes Are So Human As Those That Reflect For Us, Out Of The Confusion Of Life, The Close Connection Of Bliss And Bale, Of The Things That Help With The Things That Hurt, So Dangling Before Us Forever That Bright Hard Medal, Of So Strange An Alloy, One Face Of Which Is Somebody's Right And Ease And The Other Somebody's Pain And Wrong.

One Is Oneself A Fine Consequence.

Money's A Horrid Thing To Follow, But A Charming Thing To Meet.

It's Never Permitted To Be Surprised At The Aberrations Of Born Fools.

Her Reputation For Reading A Great Deal Hung About Her Like The Cloudy Envelope Of A Goddess In An Epic.

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.

Most English Talk Is A Quadrille In A Sentry-box.

Happy You Poets Who Can Be Present And So Present By A Simple Flicker Of Your Genius, And Not, Like The Clumsier Race, Have To Laya Train And Pile Up Faggots That May Not After Prove In The Least Combustible!

Cats And Monkeys; Monkeys And Cats; All Human Life Is There.

The Artist Is Present In Every Page Of Every Book From Which He Sought So Assiduously To Eliminate Himself.

I've Struck Up A Tremendous Intimacy With Conte Alberto, And We Literally Can't Live Without Each Other. He Is The First Object My Eyes Greet In The Morning, And The Last At Night.

If I Should Certainly Say To A Novice, 'write From Experience And Experience Only,' I Should Feel That This Was Rather A Tantalizing Monition If I Were Not Careful Immediately To Add, 'try To Be One Of The People On Whom Nothing Is Lost.'

I Recall This Passage As The Hour Of Its First Fully Coming Over Me That She Was A Beautiful Liberal Creature. I Had Seen Her Personality In Glimpses And Gleams, Like A Song Sung In Snatches, But Now It Was Before Me In A Large Rosy Glow, As If It Had Been A Full Volume Of Sound. I Heard The Whole Of The Air, And It Was Sweet Fresh Music, Which I Was Often To Hum Over.(sir Edmund Orme)

I Adore Adverbs; They Are The Only Qualifications I Really Much Respect.

Her Memory's Your Love. You Want No Other.

Art Does Not Lie In Copying Nature.- Nature Furnishes The Material By Means Of Which Is To Express A Beauty Still Unexpressed In Nature.-the Artist Beholds In Nature More Than She Herself Is Conscious Of.

The Right Time Is Any Time That One Is Still So Lucky As To Have.

I Am Blackly Bored When They Are At Large And At Work; But Somehow I Am Still More Blackly Bored When They Are Shut Up In Holloway And We Are Deprived Of Them.

Always Keep A Window In The Attic Open; Not Just Cracked: Open.

Deep Experience Is Never Peaceful.

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.

Kidd, Turn Off The Light To Spare My Blushes.

An Englishman's Never So Natural As When He's Holding His Tongue.

It Is Altogether An Extraordinary Growing, Swarming, Glittering, Pushing, Chattering, Good-natured, Cosmopolitan Place, And Perhaps In Some Ways The Best Imitation Of Paris That Can Be Found (with A Great Originality Of Its Own).

Nothing, Of Course, Will Ever Take The Place Of The Good Old Fashion Of 'liking' A Work Of Art Or Not Liking It; The More Improved Criticism Will Not Abolish That Primitive, That Ultimate, Test.

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.

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.

Oxford Lends Sweetness To Labour And Dignity To Leisure.

All The Same Don't Forget That You're Young — Blessedly Young; Be Glad Of It On The Contrary And Live Up To It. 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.

One Can't Judge Till One's Forty; Before That We're Too Eager, Too Hard, Too Cruel, And In Addition Much Too Ignorant.

In The Long Run An Opinion Often Borrows Credit From The Forbearance Of Its Patrons.

The Superiority Of One Man's Opinion Over Another's Is Never So Great As When The Opinion Is About A Woman.

We Must Grant The Artist His Subject, His Idea, His Donn´e: Our Criticism Is Applied Only To What He Makes Of It.

God's Creature Is One. He Makes Man, Not Men. His True Creature Is Unitary And Infinite, Revealing Himself, Indeed, In Every Finite Form, But Compromised By None.

Every Governmental Institution Has Been A Standing Testimony To The Harmonic Destiny Of Society, A Standing Proof That The Life Of Man Is Destined For Peace And Amity, Instead Of Disorder And Contention.

I Call People Rich When They're Able To Meet The Requirements Of Their Imagination.

Ideas Are, In Truth, Force.

To Live In The World Of Creation-to Get Into It And Stay In It-to Frequent It And Haunt It...to Think Intently And Fruitfully, To Woo Combinations And Inspirations Into Being By A Depth And Continuity Of Attention And Meditation-this Is The Only Thing.

She Had Her Own Way Of Doing All That She Did, And This Is The Simplest Description Of A Character Which, Although By No Means Without Liberal Motions, Rarely Succeeded In Giving An Impression Of Suavity.

If This Was Love, Love Had Been Overrated.

To Read Between The Lines Was Easier Than To Follow The Text.

Read Between The Lines

...and The Great Advantage Of Being A Literary Woman, Was That You Could Go Everywhere And Do Everything.

To Believe In A Child Is To Believe In The Future. Through Their Aspirations They Will Save The World. With Their Combined Knowledge The Turbulent Seas Of Hate And Injustice Will Be Calmed.

A Tradition Is Kept Alive Only By Something Being Added To It.

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.

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.

I Don't Want Everyone To Like Me; I Should Think Less Of Myself If Some People Did.

The Deepest Quality Of A Work Of Art Will Always Be The Quality Of The Mind Of The Producer...no Good Novel Will Ever Proceed From A Superficial Mind.

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.

Live As You Like Best, And Your Character Will Take Care Of Itself. Most Things Are Good For You; The Exceptions Are Very Rare.

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.

It Is Indeed Immensely Picturesque. I Can Fancy Sitting All A Summer's Day Watching Its Shadows Shorten And Lengthen Again, And Drawing A Delicious Contrast Between The World's Duration And The Feeble Span Of Individual Experience. There Is Something In Stonehenge Almost Reassuring; And If You Are Disposed To Feel That Life Is Rather A Superficial Matter, And That We Soon Get To The Bottom Of Things, The Immemorial Gray Pillars May Serve To Remind You Of The Enormous Background Of Time.

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

We Work In The Dark -- We Do What We Can -- We Give What We Have.

Everything About Florence Seems To Be Colored With A Mild Violet, Like Diluted Wine.

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.

She Was A Woman Who, Between Courses, Could Be Graceful With Her Elbows On The Table.

She Is Like A Revolving Lighthouse; Pitch Darkness Alternating With A Dazzling Brilliancy!

New York Is Appalling, Fantastically Charmless And Elaborately Dire.

She Had An Unequalled Gift, Especially Pen In Hand, Of Squeezing Big Mistakes Into Small Opportunities.

There's No More Usual Basis Of Union Than Mutual Misunderstanding.

Experience Is Never Limited, And It Is Never Complete

You Are Good For Nothing Unless You Are Clever.

The Story Had Held Us, Round The Fire, Sufficiently Breathless, But Except The Obvious Remark That It Was Gruesome, As, On Christmas Eve In An Old House, A Strange Tale Should Essentially Be . . .

The Advantage, The Luxury, As Well As The Torment And Responsibility Of The Novelist, Is That There Is No Limit To What He May Attempt As An Executant - No Limit To His Possible Experiments, Efforts, Discoveries, Successes.

Any Point Of View Is Interesting That Is A Direct Impression Of Life. You Each Have An Impression Colored By Your Individual Conditions; Make That Into A Picture, A Picture Framed By Your Own Personal Wisdom, Your Glimpse Of The American World.

... Since She Might Not Be Splendid, She Would At Least Be Immaculate.

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.

Under Certain Circumstances There Are Few Hours In Life More Agreeable Than The Hour Dedicated To The Ceremony Known As Afternoon Tea.

The Effort Really To See And Really To Represent Is No Idle Business In Face Of The Constant Force That Makes For Muddlement. The Great Thing Is Indeed That The Muddled State Too Is One Of The Very Sharpest Of The Realities, That It Also Has Color And Form And Character, Has Often In Fact A Broad And Rich Comicality.

And Remember This, That If You've Been Hated, You've Also Been Loved.

He Was There Or Was Not There: Not There If I Didn't See Him.

She Is Written In A Foreign Tongue.

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.

However British You May Be, I Am More British Still.

The Artist Beholds In Nature More Than She Herself Nature Is Conscious Of.

If You Have Work To Do, Don't Wait To Feel Like It; Set To Work And You Will Feel Like It.

..her Smile, Which Was Her Pretty Feature, Was Never So Pretty As When Her Sprightly Phrase Had A Scratch Lurking In It.

It Might Seem That An Egg Which Has Succeeded In Being Fresh Has Done All That Can Reasonably Be Expected Of It.

The Historian, Essentially, Wants More Documents Than He Can Really Use; The Dramatist Only Wants More Liberties Than He Can Really Take.

It Is No Wonder He Wins Every Game. He Has Never Done A Thing In His Life Exept Play Games

England Always Seems To Me Like A Man Swimming With His Clothes On His Head.

The Black And Merciless Things That Are Behind The Great Possessions.

Art Without Life Is A Poor Affair.

Really, Universally, Relations Stop Nowhere, And The Exquisite Problem Of The Artist Is Eternally But To Draw, By A Geometry Of His Own, The Circle Within Which They Shall Happily Appear To Do So.

If You Haven't Had Your Life What Have You Had?

He Is The Same Old Sausage, Fizzing And Sputtering In His Own Grease.

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?

Congratulations

Writing Is Not Primarily Escape, But Use.

You Seemed To Me To Be Soaring Far Up In The Blue - To Be Sailing In The Bright Light, Over The Heads Of Men. Suddenly Some One Tosses Up A Faded Rosebud - A Missile That Should Never Have Reached You - And Down You Drop To The Ground.

Of Course You're Always At Liberty To Judge The Critic. Judge People As Critics, However, And You'll Condemn Them All!

The Effect, If Not The Prime Office, Of Criticism Is To Make Our Absorption And Our Enjoyment Of The Things That Feed The Mind As Aware Of Itself As Possible, Since That Awareness Quickens The Mental Demand, Which Thus In Turn Wanders Further And Further For Pasture. This Action On The Part Of The Mind Practically Amounts To A Reaching Out For The Reasons Of Its Interest, As Only By Its Ascertaining Them Can The Interest Grow More Various. This Is The Very Education Of Our Imaginative Life.

Things Are Always Different Than What They Might Be...if You Wait For Them To Change, You Will Never Do Anything.

No Sovereign, No Court, No Personal Loyalty, No Aristocracy, No Church, No Clergy, No Army, No Diplomatic Service, No Country Gentlemen, No Palaces, No Castles, Nor Manors, Nor Old Country-houses, Nor Parsonages, Nor Thatched Cottages Nor Ivied Ruins No Cathedrals, Nor Abbeys, Nor Little Norman Churches No Great Universities Nor Public Schools -- No Oxford, Nor Eton, Nor Harrow No Literature, No Novels, No Museums, No Pictures, No Political Society, No Sporting Class -- No Epsom Nor Ascot Some Such List As That Might Be Drawn Up Of The Absent Things In American Life.

I Intend To Judge Things For Myself; To Judge Wrongly, I Think, Is More Honorable Than Not To Judge At All.

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.

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.

I Think Patriotism Is Like Charity -- It Begins At Home.

The Fatal Futility Of Fact.

Never Say You Know The Last Word About Any Human Heart.

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.

Trending Author

William J. Clinton

Category