Arnold Bennett Quotes (42 Quotes)

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Anthology construction is one of the pleasantest hobbies that a person who is not mad about golf and bridge - that is to say, a thinking person - can possibly have

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Women are strange and incomprehensible, a device invented by Providence to keep the wit of man well sharpened by constant employment

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

A sense of the value of time - that is, of the best way to divide one's time into one's various activities - is an essential preliminary to efficient work it is the only method of avoiding hurry

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

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.

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

The supply of time is a daily miracle. You wake up in the morning and lo Your purse is magnificently filled with 24 hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of life. It is yours The most precious of your possessions.

The price of justice is eternal publicity.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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