Arnold Bennett Quotes

64 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Arnold Bennett
Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism. Indeed, I think it must be more agreeable, must have a more real savor, than optimism—from the way in which pessimists abandon themselves to it.

Arnold Bennett
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
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.

Arnold Bennett
Examine the Honours List and you can instantly tell how the Government feels in its inside. When the Honours List is full of rascals, millionaires, and – er – chumps, you may be quite sure that the Government is dangerously ill.

Arnold Bennett
The foundation of England's greatness is that Englishmen hate to look fools.

Arnold Bennett
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; in its right, authentic colors; without making comparisons. Cherish and burnish this faculty of seeing crudely, simply, artlessly, ignorantly; of seeing like a baby or a lunatic, who lives each moment by itself and tarnishes by the present no remembrance of the past.

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

Arnold Bennett
Make love to every woman you meet. If you get five percent on your outlays it's a good investment.

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

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

Arnold Bennett
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
A 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
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
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.

Arnold Bennett
'Ye can call it influenza if ye like,' said Mrs Machin. 'There was no influenza in my young days. We called a cold a cold.'

Arnold Bennett
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
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
Mrs Laye … told a good thing of a very old man on his dying bed giving advice to a youngster: 'I've had a long life, and it's been a merry one. Take my advice. Make love to every pretty woman you meet. And remember, if you get 5 per cent on your outlay it's a good return.'

Arnold Bennett
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
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.

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

Arnold Bennett
The novelist is he who, having seen life, and being so excited by it that he absolutely must transmit his vision to others, chooses narrative fiction as the liveliest vehicle for the relief of his feelings.

Arnold Bennett
Good taste is better than bad taste, but bad taste is better than no taste, and men without individuality have no taste—at any rate no taste that they can impose on their publics.

Arnold Bennett