Arnold Bennett's Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

The price of justice is eternal publicity.

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.

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.