Arnold Bennett Quotes

Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism.

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.

No mind, however loving, could bear to see plainly into all the recess of another mind.

Mother is far too clever to understand anything she does not like.

Always behave as if nothing had happened, no matter what has happened.

Worry is evidence of an ill-controlled brain; it is merely a stupid waste of time in unpleasantness. If men and women practiced mental calisthenics as they do physical calisthenics, they would purge their brains of this foolishness.

Most people sleep themselves stupid.

The parents exist to teach the child, but also they must learn what the child has to teach them; and the child has a very great deal to teach them

It is difficult to make a reputation, but is even more difficult seriously to mar a reputation once properly made --- so faithful is the public.

The test of a first-rate work, and a test of your sincerity in calling it a first-rate work, is that you finish it.

Because her instinct has told her, or because she has been reliably informed, the faded virgin knows that the supreme joys are not for her; she knows by a process of the intellect; but she can feel her deprivation no more than the young mother can feel the hardship of the virgin's lot.

Only a very gifted mind could cope singly with all the problems which present themselves in the perfecting of a home.

A cause may be inconvenient, but it's magnificent. It's like champagne or high heels, and one must be prepared to suffer for it.

Journalists say a thing that they know isn't true, in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true.

As a rule people don't collect books; they let books collect themselves.

You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. No one can take it from you. It is unstealable. And no one receives either more or less than you receive.

The real Tragedy is the tragedy of the man who never in his life braces himself for his one supreme effort-he never stretches to his full capacity, never stands up to his full stature.

The most important preliminary to the task of arranging one's life so that one may live fully and comfortably within one's daily budget of 24 hours is the calm realization of the extreme difficulty of the task, of the sacrifices and the endless effort which it demands.

It is only people of small stature who have to stand on their dignity.

Literature exists so that where one man has lived finely ten thousand may afterward live finely

Time is the explicable raw material of everything.

I will never cease advising my friends and enemies to read poetry before anything.

I think it rather fine, this necessity for the tense bracing of the will before anything worth doing can be done. I rather like it myself. I feel it is to be the chief thing that differentiates me from the cat by the fire.

Of all the inhabitants of the inferno, none but Lucifer knows that hell is hell, and the secret function of purgatory is to make of heaven an effective reality.

It is easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is from the top.

If you've ever really been poor you remain poor at heart all your life. I've often walked when I could very well afford to take a taxi because I simply couldn't bring myself to waste the shilling it would cost.

The war years count double. Things and people not actively in use age twice as fast.

The great advantage of being in a rut is that when one is in a rut, one knows exactly where one is.

To the artist is sometimes granted a sudden, transient insight which serves in this matter for experience. A flash, and where previously the brain held a dead fact, the soul grasps a living truth! At moments we are all artists.

A first-rate organizer is never in a hurry. He is never late. He always keeps up his sleeve a margin for the unexpected.

There is no magic method of beginning... Take hold of your nerves, and jump.

To my mind the most poignant mystical exhoration ever written is "Be still and know that I am God."

The people who live in the past must yield to the people who live in the future. Otherwise the world would begin to turn the other way round.

During a long and varied career as a bachelor, dear spouse [mock platform manner], I have noticed that marriage is usually the death of politeness between a man and a woman.

The man who begins to go to bed forty minutes before he opens his bedroom door is bored; that is to say, he is not living.

One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change - not rest, except in sleep.

Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without ingenuity.

A sense of the value of time... is an essential preliminary to efficient work; it is the only method of avoiding hurry.

The only way to write a great book is to write it with the eyes of a child who sees things for the first time.