Arnold Bennett Quotes

64 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Arnold Bennett
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.

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

Arnold Bennett
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
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
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
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
You are not in charge of the universe; you are in charge of yourself.

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

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

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

Arnold Bennett
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.

Arnold Bennett
Seventy minutes had passed before Mr Lloyd George arrived at his proper theme. He spoke for a hundred and seventeen minutes, in which period he was detected only once in the use of an argument.

Arnold Bennett
Yes books are valuable. But no reading of books will take the place of a daily, candid, honest examination of what one has recently done, and what one is about to do - of a steady looking at one's self in the face (disconcerting though the sight may be).

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

Arnold Bennett
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
His opinion of himself, having once risen, remained at 'set fair'.

Arnold Bennett
Being a husband is a whole-time job. That is why so many husbands fail. They can't give their entire attention to it.

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

Arnold Bennett
'What great cause is he identified with?' 'He's identified…with the great cause of cheering us all up.'

Arnold Bennett
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
The price of justice is eternal publicity.

Arnold Bennett
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