Quote #64

The fatal futility of Fact.

More from Henry James

  1. Life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection, the latter, in search of the hard latent value with…
  2. 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 th…
  3. To see deep difficulty braved is at any time, for the really addicted artist, to feel almost even as a pang the beautiful incentive, and to…
  4. 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 thi…
  5. There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth... than that of the perfect dependence of the 'moral' sense of a work of art on th…
  6. To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing a…
  7. Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, th…
  8. The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.

All Henry James quotes