Arnold Bennett Quotations

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Being a husband is a whole-time job. That is why so many husbands fail. They cannot give their entire attention to it.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

The price of Justice is eternal publicity.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

During a long and varied career as a bachelor, I have noticed that marriage is the death of politeness between a man and a woman.

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.

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

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.

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.

Most people sleep themselves stupid.

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

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

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.

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

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

The saxophone is the embodied spirit of beer.

I do want an expensive honeymoon. Not because I'm extravagant, but because a honeymoon is a solemn, important thing ... a symbol. And it ought to be done -- well, adequately.

In search of ideas I spent yesterday morning in walking about, and went to the stores and bought things in four departments. A wonderful and delightful way of spending time. I think this sort of activity does stimulate creative ideas.

If you've ever really been poor, you remain poor at heart all your life.

Great wealth may be to its owner a blessing or a curse. Alas! I fear it is too often the latter. It hardens the heart, blunts the finer susceptibilities, and transforms into a fiend what under more favourable circumstances might have been a human being.

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

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

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

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

The manner in which one single ray of light, one single precious hint, will clarify and energize the whole mental life of him who receives it, is among the most wonderful and heavenly of intellectual phenomena.

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

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

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

Being a husband is a whole time job. That is why so many husbands fail. They cannot give their entire attention to it.

Procrastination is suicide on the installment plan.

Time is the explicable raw material of everything.

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

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.

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.

If you imagine that you will be able to achieve your ideal by ingeniously planning out a timetable with a pen on a piece of paper, you had better give up hope at once.If you are not prepared for discouragements and disillusions; if you will not be content with a small result for a big effort, then do not begin. Lie down again and resume the uneasy doze which you call your existence.

You probably think of the orchestra as a heterogeneous mass of instruments producing a confused agreeable mass of sound. You do not listen for details because you have never trained your ears to listen to details.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Being a husband is a whole-time job.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

At moments we are all artists.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking.

Far from the madding crowd is a mistake on a honeymoon.... Solitude! Wherever you are, if you're on a honeymoon, you'll get quite as much solitude as is good for you every twenty-four hours. Constant change and distraction -- that's what wants arranging for. Solitude will arrange itself.

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.

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

The traveler, however virginal and enthusiastic, does not enjoy an unbroken ecstasy. He has periods of gloom, periods when he asks himself the object of all these exertions, and puts the question whether or not he is really experiencing pleasure. At such times he suspects that he is not seeing the right things, that the characteristic, the right aspects of these strange scenes are escaping him. He looks forward dully to the days of his holiday yet to pass, and wonders how he will dispose of them. He is disgusted because his money is not more, his command of the language so slight, and his capacity for enjoyment so limited.