I think patriotism is like charity -- it begins at home.
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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.
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Thanks to his constant habit of shaking the bottle in which life handed him the wine of experience, he presently found the taste of the lees rising as usual into his draught.
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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.
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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.
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Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard.
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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.
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Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
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In spite of overwhelming evidence, it is most difficult for a citizen of western Europe to bring thoroughly home to himself the truth that the civilisation which surrounds him is a rare exception in the history of the world.
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It struck him really that he had never so lived with her as during this period of her silence; the silence was a sacred hush, a finer clearer medium, in which her idiosyncrasies showed.
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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.
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He is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease.
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Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.
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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.
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I feel how little she can like being told of her owing me anything. No woman ever enjoys such an obligation to another woman.
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She had fortunately always her appetite for news. The pure flame of the disinterested burned in her cave of treasures as a lamp in a Byzantine vault.
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In art economy is always beauty.
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He had the entertainment of thinking that if he had for that moment stopped the clock it was to promote the next minute this still livelier motion.
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To treat a big subject in the intensely summarized fashion demanded by an evening's traffic of the stage when the evening, freely clipped at each end, is reduced to two hours and a half, is a feat of which the difficulty looms large.
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'There are certainly moments,' said Chad, 'when you seem to me too good to be true. Yet if you are true,' he added, 'that seems to be all that need concern me.'
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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.
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She had an unequalled gift... of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.
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It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
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Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.
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Henry James chews more than he bites off.
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It's time to start living the life you've imagined.
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Summer afternoon - Summer afternoon... the two most beautiful words in the English language.
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A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.
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Deep experience is never peaceful.
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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
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