Top 100 Arnold Bennett Quotes
#1. I hate England and its hopelessness. I hate [Arnold] Bennett's resignation. Tragedy ought really to be a great big kick at misery.
D.H. Lawrence
#2. Mr. Arnold Bennett feels he has ranked himself for ever as a dry wine by what he mixed with himself of Maupassant; nevertheless he has put on the market some grocer's Sauterne in the form of several novels that are highly sentimental so far as their fundamental balance of values is concerned.
Rebecca West
#3. Arnold Bennett was a writer I admired. He was actually taking notes at his father's deathbed.
Hugh Leonard
#4. Jane Austen? I feel that I am approaching dangerous ground. The reputation of Jane Austen is surrounded by cohorts of defenders who are ready to do murder for their sacred cause.
Arnold Bennett
#5. The war years count double. Things and people not actively in use age twice as fast.
Arnold Bennett
#6. 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.
Arnold Bennett
#8. Being a husband is a whole-time job. That is why so many husbands fail. They cannot give their entire attention to it.
Arnold Bennett
#9. 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.
Arnold Bennett
#10. One-act [plays] are not strikingly remunerative, but, on the other hand, the veriest dullard could not spend more than a week in writing one.
Arnold Bennett
#11. 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.
Arnold Bennett
#12. 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.
Arnold Bennett
#13. And since nothing whatever happens to us outside our own brain; since nothing hurt us or gives us pleasure except within the brain, the supreme importance of being able to control what goes on in that mysterious brain is patent.
Arnold Bennett
#14. Only people, especially Anglo-Saxons, are so afraid lest joyfulness may somehow be reprehensible that they will never admit it as a lawful and laudable end in itself.
Arnold Bennett
#15. To my mind the most poignant mystical exhoration ever written is "Be still and know that I am God."
Arnold Bennett
#16. 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.
Arnold Bennett
#17. I will never cease advising my friends and enemies to read poetry before anything.
Arnold Bennett
#18. Until an effort is made to satisfy that wish, the sense of uneasy waiting for something to start which has not started will remain to disturb the peace of the soul.
Arnold Bennett
#19. The public is a great actuality, like war. If you are a creative and creating artist, you cannot ignore it, though it can ignore you.
Arnold Bennett
#20. 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.
Arnold Bennett
#21. 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.
Arnold Bennett
#22. You are not in charge of the universe; you are in charge of yourself.
Arnold Bennett
#23. A true friend is one who likes you despite your achievements.
Arnold Bennett
#24. It is easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is from the top.
Arnold Bennett
#25. Falsehood often lurks upon the tongue of him, who, by self-praise, seeks to enhance his value in the eyes of others.
Arnold Bennett
#26. 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.
Arnold Bennett
#27. 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.
Arnold Bennett
#28. 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.
Arnold Bennett
#29. Well, my deliberate opinion is - it's a jolly strange world.
Arnold Bennett
#30. 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.
Arnold Bennett
#31. 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.
Arnold Bennett
#32. 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.
Arnold Bennett
#33. 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.
Arnold Bennett
#34. Any change, even a change for the better is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.
Arnold Bennett
#35. There grows in the North Country a certain kind of youth of whom it may be said that he is born to be a Londoner.
Arnold Bennett
#36. Time is the explicable raw material of everything.
Arnold Bennett
#37. Readers of a certain class are apt to call good the plot of that story in which "you can't tell what is going to happen next." But in some of the most tedious novels ever written you can't tell what is going to happen next--and you don't care a fig what is going to happen next.
Arnold Bennett
#38. 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.
Arnold Bennett
#39. The entire landscape was illuminated and transformed by these unique pyrotechnics of labour atoning for its grime, and dull, weird sounds, as of the breathings and sighings of gigantic nocturnal creatures, filled the enchanted air.
Arnold Bennett
#40. 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.
Arnold Bennett
#41. There is no magic method of beginning ... Take hold of your nerves, and jump.
Arnold Bennett
#42. Make love to every woman you meet; if you get five per cent of your outlay it's a good investment.
Arnold Bennett
#43. Literature exists so that where one man has lived finely ten thousand may afterward live finely
Arnold Bennett
#44. The proper, wise balancing
of one's whole life may depend upon the
feasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.
Arnold Bennett
#45. 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.
Arnold Bennett
#46. If a man makes two-thirds of his existence subservient to one-third, for which admittedly he has no absolutely feverish zest, how can he hope to live fully and completely? He cannot.
Arnold Bennett
#48. The chief beauty about the constant supply of time is that you cannot waste it in advance.
Arnold Bennett
#49. It is within the experience of everyone that when pleasure and pain reach a certain intensity they are indistinguishable.
Arnold Bennett
#50. Prepare to live by all means, but for Heaven's sake do not forget to live.
Arnold Bennett
#51. Without the power to concentrate that
is to say, without the power to dictate to the brain its task and to ensure obedience true life is impossible. Mind control is the first element of a full existence.
Arnold Bennett
#52. Mother is far too clever to understand anything she does not like.
Arnold Bennett
#53. You have to live on this twenty-four hours of daily time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution of your immortal soul.
Arnold Bennett
#54. The pleasure of doing a thing in the same way at the same time every day, and savoring it, should be noted.
Arnold Bennett
#55. France is the land where dalliance is so passionately understood.
Arnold Bennett
#56. Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without ingenuity.
Arnold Bennett
#57. 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.
Arnold Bennett
#58. Only a very gifted mind could cope singly with all the problems which present themselves in the perfecting of a home.
Arnold Bennett
#59. I am entirely convinced that what is more than anything else lacking in the life of the average well-intentioned man of to-day is the reflective mood.
Arnold Bennett
#60. A life in which conduct does not fairly well accord with principles is a silly life; and that conduct can only be made to accord with principles by means of daily examination, reflection, and resolution.
Arnold Bennett
#61. 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.
Arnold Bennett
#62. 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.
Arnold Bennett
#63. If egotism means a terrific interest in one's self, egotism is absolutely essential to efficient living.
Arnold Bennett
#64. 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.
Arnold Bennett
#67. The artist who is too sensitive for contacts with the non-artistic world is thereby too sensitive for his vocation, and fit only to fall into gentle ecstasies over the work of artists less sensitive than himself.
Arnold Bennett
#69. chief beauty about the constant supply of 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 unspoilt, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your career.
Arnold Bennett
#70. 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.
Arnold Bennett
#71. As a rule people don't collect books; they let books collect themselves.
Arnold Bennett
#72. Money is far commoner than time. When one reflects, one perceives that money is just about the commonest thing there is.
Arnold Bennett
#73. Humanity walks ever on a thin crust over terrific abysses.
Arnold Bennett
#75. The manner of his life was of no importance. What affected her was that he had once been young. That he had grown old, and was now dead. That was all. Youth and vigour had come to that. Youth and vigour always came to that. Everything came to that.
Arnold Bennett
#76. 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.
Arnold Bennett
#77. Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.
Arnold Bennett
#78. 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.
Arnold Bennett
#79. Beware of undertaking too much at the start. Be content with quite a little. Allow for accidents. Allow for human nature, especially your own.
Arnold Bennett
#80. Concentrate on something useful. Having decided to achieve a task, achieve it at all costs.
Arnold Bennett
#81. No mind, however loving, could bear to see plainly into all the recess of another mind.
Arnold Bennett
#82. I can't have you making tea for me. It's not decent.
Arnold Bennett
#83. A sense of the value of time ... is an essential preliminary to efficient work; it is the only method of avoiding hurry.
Arnold Bennett
#84. 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.
Arnold Bennett
#85. A man of sixty has spent twenty years in bed and over three years in eating.
Arnold Bennett
#86. I hate being asked what I want. Because I never know.
Arnold Bennett
#87. To be loved without a shred of any reserve is a necessity for me.
Arnold Bennett
#88. You can only acquire really useful general ideas by first acquiring particular ideas ... You cannot make bricks without straw.
Arnold Bennett
#89. There was something magnificent in dire tragedy, in the terror of it, in the necessity which it laid upon everybody to behave nobly and efficiently.
Arnold Bennett
#90. 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.
Arnold Bennett
#91. 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.
Arnold Bennett
#92. 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.
Arnold Bennett
#93. 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.
Arnold Bennett
#94. 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
Arnold Bennett
#95. Dear sir, you simply begin. There is no magic method of beginning. If a man standing on the edge of a swimming-bath and wanting to jump into the cold water should ask you, "How do I begin to jump?" you would merely reply, "Just jump. Take hold of your nerves, and jump.
Arnold Bennett
#96. A first-rate organizer is never in a hurry. He is never late. He always keeps up his sleeve a margin for the unexpected.
Arnold Bennett
#97. 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.
Arnold Bennett
#98. Always behave as if nothing had happened, no matter what has happened.
Arnold Bennett
#99. I'm not ruthless. It's common sense that's ruthless.
Arnold Bennett
#100. Having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all costs of tedium and distaste. The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labour is immense.
Arnold Bennett
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