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"What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?"
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"Faithfulness to one's word is one of the principles of discipline."

"It is only the man that delays his gratification that is a man indeed."

"Katy was neither a Methodist nor a Masochist. She was a goddess and the silence of goddesses is genuinely golden. None of your superficial plating. A solid, twenty-two-carat silence all the way through. The Olympian's trap is kept shut, not by an act of willed discretion, but because there's really nothing to say. Goddesses are all of one piece. There's no internal conflict in them. Whereas the lives of people like you and me are one long argument. Desires on one side, woodpeckers on the other. Never a moment of real silence."

"You become a hypocrite when you can't freely be at peace with others, but you can carry green palm leaves to church to commemorate "palm Sunday"! Throw those palm leaves somewhere; and lay your life down for someone to walk on and get to the destined land!"
Explore more quotes by Henry James

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language."

"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."

"The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman."

"The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting."
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