Henry James Quotes

There is room in the halls of pleasure for a large and lordly train, but one by one we must all file on through the narrow aisles of pain.

There's only one thing that's certainAnd that's everybody, everybody's hurting

How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?

Man hurts man, time and time again. As we drown in the wake of our power, somebody tell me why?

Our life is...a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment.

To suffer and to endure is the lot of humanity.

We have not an hour of life in which our pleasures relish not some pain, our sours, some sweetness.

It hurts to look at the clouds, but it also helps, like most things that cause pain. So I need to run, and as my lungs burn and my back rebels with that stabbing knife feeling and my legs muscles harden and the half inch of loose skin around my waist jiggles, I feel as though my penance for the day is being done and that maybe God will be pleased enough to lend me some help, which I think is why He has been showing me interesting clouds for the past week.

I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.

You can feel the whole world and still feel lost in it. So many people are in pain-- no matter how smart or accomplished--they cry, they yearn, they hurt. But instead of looking down on things, they look up, which is where I should have been looking, too. Because when the world quiets to the sound of your own breathing, we all want the same things: comfort, love and a peaceful heart.

What else are our lives but a story we tell ourselves to find some sense in the pain ofliving?

The tragedy of our lives is that, while we suffer from the wounds afflicted on us by those who love us, we cannot avoid wounding those we want to love.

Everyone is in pain.No matter where they come from or what you think of them. Sorrow spares no one

True fighters dare face the sorrows of humanity, and look unflinchingly at bloodshed. What sorrow and joy are theirs! But the Creator's common device for ordinary people is to let the passage of time wash away old traces leaving only pale-red bloodstains and a vague pain; and he lets men live on ignobly and amid these, to keep this quasi-human world going.

If no love is, O God, what fele I so? And if love is, what thing and which is he? If love be good, from whennes cometh my woo? If it be wikke, a wonder thynketh me

She worked her toes into the sand, feeling the tiny delicious pain of the friction of tiny chips of silicon against the tender flesh between her toes. That's life. It hurts, it's dirty, and it feels very, very good.

I think that hurting gives us a way to measure being happy. How can you know one without knowing the other.

My life has been like all the lives, long and hard and full of sadness and confusion and horror, a frightening, difficult dream punctuated by brief moments of joy. And as is the case with all people's lives, the moments of joy are never often enough and never long enough.

A hurt body and mind aren't just like a dictatorship; they are a dictatorship. There is no tyrant as merciless as pain, no despot so cruel as confusion.

The pleasure of despair. But then, it is in despair that we find the most acute pleasure, especially when we are aware of the hopelessness of the situation... ...everything is a mess in which it is impossible to tell what's what, but that despite this impossibility and deception it still hurts you, and the less you can understand, the more it hurts.

What we are really living for is the experience of life, both the pain and the pleasure.

Being in darkness and confusion is interesting to me. But behind it you can rise out of that and see things the way the really are. That there is some sort of truth to the whole thing, if you could just get to that point where you could see it, and live it, and feel it. I think it is a long, long, way off. In the meantime there’s suffering and darkness and confusion and absurdities, and it’s people kind of going in circles. It’s fantastic. It’s like a strange carnival: it’s a lot of fun, but it’s a lot of pain.

Wrath brings mortal men their gravest hurt.