Arnold Bennett Quotes

The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labour is immense.

Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.

Good taste is better than bad taste, but bad taste is better than no taste.

Make love to every woman you meet; if you get five per cent of your outlay it's a good investment.

A true friend is one who likes you despite your achievements.

Nearly all bookish people are snobs, and especially the more enlightened among them. They are apt to assume that if a writer has immense circulation, if he is enjoyed by plain persons, and if he can fill several theatres at once, he cannont possibly be worth reading and merits only indifference and disdain.

Ninety percent of the friction of daily life is caused by tone of voice.

Procrastination is suicide on the installment plan.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

All wrong doing is done in the sincere belief that it is the best thing to do.

The chances are that you have already come to believe that happiness is unattainable. But men have attained it. And they have attained it by realizing that happiness does not spring from the procuring of physical or mental pleasure, but from the development of reason and the adjustment of conduct to principles.

Well, my deliberate opinion is - it's a jolly strange world.

The moment you're born you're done for.

Saw Washington Monument. Phallic. Appalling. A national catastrophe.

The best cure for worry, depression, melancholy, brooding, is to go deliberately forth and try to lift with one's sympathy the gloom of somebody else.

You can only acquire really useful general ideas by first acquiring particular ideas . . . You cannot make bricks without straw.

It is well, when judging a friend, to remember that he is judging you with the same godlike and superior impartiality.

Every scene, even the commonest, is wonderful, if only one can detach oneself, casting off all memory of use and custom, and behold it (as it were) for the first time; in its right, authentic colors; without making comparisons. Cherish and burnish this faculty of seeing crudely, simply, artlessly, ignorantly; of seeing like a baby or a lunatic, who lives each moment by itself and tarnishes by the present no remembrance of the past.

Worry is evidence of an ill-controlled brain; it is merely a stupid waste of time in unpleasantness.

Beware of undertaking too much at the start. Be content with quite a little. Allow for accidents. Allow for human nature, especially your own.

The chief beauty about time is that you cannot waste it in advance. The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoiled, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your life. You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose.

The makers of literature are those who have seen and felt the miraculous interestingness of the universe. If you have formed...literary taste...your life will be one long ecstasy of denying that the world is a dull place.

Prepare to live by all means, but for Heaven's sake do not forget to live.

Concentrate on something useful. Having decided to achieve a task, achieve it at all costs.

You can turn over a new leaf every hour
if you choose.

We need a sense of the value of time - that is, of the best way to divide one's time into one's various activities.

Which of us is not saying to himself which of us has not been saying to himself all his life: " I shall alter that when I have a little more time"? We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is.

The pleasure of doing a thing in the same way at the same time every day, and savoring it, should be noted.

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

The price of Justice is eternal publicity.

Time is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible, without it nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it.

Being a husband is a whole-time job.

You are not in charge of the universe; you are in charge of yourself.

The second suggestion is to think as well as to read. I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them they might just as well cut bread-and-butter. They take to reading as better men take to drink. They fly through the shires of literature on a motor-car, their sole object being motion. They will tell you how many books they have read in a year. Unless you give at least 45 minutes to careful, fatiguing reflection (it is an awful bore at first) upon what you are reading, your 90 minutes of a night are chiefly wasted.

We shall never have more time. We have, and always had, all the time there is. No object is served in waiting until next week or even until tomorrow. Keep going... Concentrate on something useful.

I don't read my reviews, I measure them.

Happiness includes chiefly the idea of satisfaction after full honest effort. No one can possibly be satisfied and no one can be happy who feels that in some paramount affairs he failed to take up the challenge of life.

I ought to reflect again and again, and yet again, that the beings that I have to steer are just as inevitable in the scheme of evolution as I am myself; have just as much right to be themselves as I am entitled to; and they all deserve from me as much sympathy as I give to myself.

Falsehood often lurks upon the tongue of him, who, by self-praise, seeks to enhance his value in the eyes of others.

There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. To the cognition of the brain must be added the experience of the soul.

The saxophone is the embodied spirit of beer.

A man of sixty has spent twenty years in bed and over three years in eating.

Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission.

It is within the experience of everyone that when pleasure and pain reach a certain intensity they are indistinguishable.

The proper, wise balancing of one's whole life may depend upon the feasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.

If egotism means a terrific interest in one's self, egotism is absolutely essential to efficient living.

I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them, they might as well cut bread and butter. Unless you give at least 45 minutes of careful, fatiguing reflection upon what you are reading, your minutes are chiefly wasted.

Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.