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"Don't question your conscience so much--it will get out of tune like a strummed piano. Keep it for great occasions."
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"The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive."
"And there, right in the middle of it, I find 'Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us.' There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven."
"Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like and I'll tell you what you are."
"Satan is never your well-wisher. Get the pleasure of making him annoyed on you by doing good deeds."
"Life is indeed terribly complicated-to a man who has lost his principles."
"If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn."
"For when once people have begun to believe that prosperity is the reward of virtue, their next calamity is obvious. If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue. Men will leave off the heavy task of making good men successful. He will adopt the easier task of making out successful men good."
"Fearlessness is the first requisite of spirituality. Cowards can never be moral."
Explore more quotes by Henry James
"I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and wrong."
"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."
"Mrs. Almond lived much farther up town, in an embryonic street with a high number-a region where the extension of the city began to assume a theoretic air, where poplars grew beside the pavement (when there was one), and mingled their shade with the steep roofs of desultory Dutch houses, and where pigs and chickens disported themselves in the gutter. These elements of rural picturesqueness have now wholly departed from New York street scenery; but they were to be found within the memory of middle-aged persons, in quarters which now would blush to be reminded of them."
"He was an awkward mixture of strong moral impulse and restless aesthetic curiosity, and yet he would have made a most ineffective reformer and a very indifferent artist. It seemed to him that the glow of happiness must be found either in action, of some immensely solid kind, on behalf of an idea, or in producing a masterpiece in one of the arts."
"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."
"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."
"He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of this life than of its privileges and pleasures."
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