Top 99 Quotes & Sayings by Arnold Bennett
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English novelist Arnold Bennett.
Last updated on December 3, 2024.
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.
Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.
The moment you're born you're done for.
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.
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 cause may be inconvenient, but it's magnificent. It's like champagne or high heels, and one must be prepared to suffer for it.
A first-rate organizer is never in a hurry. He is never late. He always keeps up his sleeve a margin for the unexpected.
The price of justice is eternal publicity.
If egotism means a terrific interest in one's self, egotism is absolutely essential to efficient living.
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.
Well, my deliberate opinion is - it's a jolly strange world.
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.
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.
Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without ingenuity.
Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission.
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.
It is easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is from the top.
Being a husband is a whole-time job. That is why so many husbands fail. They cannot give their entire attention to it.
Mother is far too clever to understand anything she does not like.
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.
Always behave as if nothing had happened, no matter what has happened.
It is within the experience of everyone that when pleasure and pain reach a certain intensity they are indistinguishable.
You can turn over a new leaf every hour
if you choose.
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 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
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.
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 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 pleasure of doing a thing in the same way at the same time every day, and savoring it, should be noted.
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.
Concentrate on something useful. Having decided to achieve a task, achieve it at all costs.
All wrong doing is done in the sincere belief that it is the best thing to do.
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.
The saxophone is the embodied spirit of beer.
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.
You are not in charge of the universe; you are in charge of yourself.
A true friend is one who likes you despite your achievements.
Ninety percent of the friction of daily life is caused by tone of voice.
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.
Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.
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.
The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labour is immense.
Time is the explicable raw material of everything.
Worry is evidence of an ill-controlled brain; it is merely a stupid waste of time in unpleasantness.
A man of sixty has spent twenty years in bed and over three years in eating.
If you've ever really been poor, you remain poor at heart all your life.
It is only people of small stature who have to stand on their dignity.
Procrastination is suicide on the installment plan.
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.
Good taste is better than bad taste, but bad taste is better than no taste.
There is no magic method of beginning... Take hold of your nerves, and jump.
The proper, wise balancing of one's whole life may depend upon the feasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.
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.
Falsehood often lurks upon the tongue of him, who, by self-praise, seeks to enhance his value in the eyes of others.
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.
Being a husband is a whole time job. That is why so many husbands fail.
They cannot give their entire attention to it.
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.
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