"There's no more usual basis of union than a mutual misunderstanding."

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More by Henry James

“Most English talk is a quadrille in a sentry-box.”

“So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!”

“The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.”

“However incumbent it may be on most of us to do our duty, there is, in spite of a thousand narrow dogmatisms, nothing in the world that anyone is under the least obligation to like — not even a particular kind of writing.”

“We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art...what we are talking about — and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered. 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.”

“The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy. Consistency was in itself distinction, and what was talent but the art of being completely whatever it was that one happened to be?”

Resonant Thoughts

"One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pinprick, but w…"

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Literature1896–1940

#time

"A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what wickedness human beings are capable of; and not be corrupted — made cynical,…"

— Susan Sontag

Literature1933–2004

#wisdom

"Though Frank Shallard might have come to admire pictures, great music, civilized furniture, he had been trained to regard them as worldly, and to content himself with art which 'presented a message,' …"

— Sinclair Lewis

Literature1885–1951

#wisdom

"It hath been my Lot to live in a time, wherein have been many and great Changes and Alterations. It hath been my endeavour all along, to act by moderate Principles, between the Extremities on either h…"

— John Wallis

Mathematics1616–1703

#knowledge