Arnold Bennett Quotes

The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it. You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. A highly singular commodity, showered upon you in a manner as singular as the commodity itself!

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

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.

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.

But though you have the wealth of a cloak-room attendant at the Carlton Hotel, you cannot buy yourself a minute more time than I have, or the cat by the fire has.

Only a very gifted mind could cope singly with all the problems which present themselves in the perfecting of a home.

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

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.

Being a husband is a whole-time job.

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.

Meat may go up in price - it has done - but books won't. Admission to picture galleries and concerts and so forth will remain quite low. The views from Richmond Hill or Hindhead, or along Pall Mall at sunset, the smell of the earth, the taste of fruit and of kisses - these things are unaffected by the machinations of trusts and the hysteria of stock exchanges.

A true friend is one who likes you despite your achievements.

The chief beauty about the constant supply of time is that you cannot waste it in advance.

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.

The saxophone is the embodied spirit of beer.

No mind, however loving, could bear to see plainly into all the recess of another mind.

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.

A man of sixty has spent twenty years in bed and over three years in eating.

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.

Prepare to live by all means, but for Heaven's sake do not forget to live.

To be loved without a shred of any reserve is a necessity for me.

The price of justice is eternal publicity.

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.

Falsehood often lurks upon the tongue of him, who, by self-praise, seeks to enhance his value in the eyes of others.

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

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.

Ardour in well-doing is a misleading and a treacherous thing. It cries out loudly for employment; you can't satisfy it at first; it wants more and more; it is eager to move mountains and divert the course of rivers. It isn't content till it perspires. And then, too often, when it feels the perspiration on its brow, it wearies all of a sudden and dies, without even putting itself to the trouble of saying, I've had enough of this.

The second suggestion is to think as well as to read. I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them they might just as well cut bread-and-butter. They take to reading as better men take to drink. They fly through the shires of literature on a motor-car, their sole object being motion. They will tell you how many books they have read in a year. Unless you give at least 45 minutes to careful, fatiguing reflection (it is an awful bore at first) upon what you are reading, your 90 minutes of a night are chiefly wasted.

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

The people who live in the past must yield to the people who live in the future. Otherwise the world would begin to turn the other way round.

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.

Good clothes, when put to the test, survive a change in fortune, as a Roman arch survives the luxury of departed empire.

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.

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

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.

Novels are excluded from "serious reading," so that the man who, bent on self-improvement, has been deciding to devote ninety minutes three times a week to a complete study of the works of Charles Dickens will be well advised to alter his plans. The reason is not that novels are not serious-some of the great literature of the world is in the form of prose fiction-the reason is that bad novels out not to be read, and that good novels never demand any appreciable mental application on the part of the reader. A good novel rushes you forward like a skiff down a stream, and you arrive at the end, perhaps breathless, but unexhausted. The best novels involve the least strain. Now in the cultivation of the mind one of the most important factors is precisely the feeling of strain, of difficulty, of a task which one part of you is anxious to achieve and another part of you is anxious to shirk; and that feeling cannot be got in facing a novel.

A man's powers ought not to be monopolised by his ordinary day's work.

...the danger of developing a policy of rush, of being gradually more and more obsessed by what one has to do next. In this way one may come to exist as in a prison, and one's life may cease to be one's own. One may take the dog out for a walk at eight o'clock, and meditate the whole time on the fact that one must begin to read at a quarter to nine, and that one must not be late.
And the occasional deliberate breaking of one's programme will not help to mend matters. The evil springs not from persisting without elasticity in what one has attempted, but from originally attempting too much, from filling one's programme till it runs over. The only cure is to reconstitute the programme, and to attempt less.

As a rule people don't collect books; they let books collect themselves.

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

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.

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

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.

I'm not ruthless. It's common sense that's ruthless.

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.

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.

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.

A sense of the value of time ... is an essential preliminary to efficient work; it is the only method of avoiding hurry.

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.

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.

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.

It is within the experience of everyone that when pleasure and pain reach a certain intensity they are indistinguishable.

At length he spoke; without moving or lifting up his face. "Here again!" he said. "Here again," replied the Phantom. "I see you in the fire," said the haunted man; "I hear you in music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of the night." The Phantom moved its head, assenting. "Why do you come, to haunt me thus?" "I come as I am called," replied the Ghost. "No. Unbidden," exclaimed the Chemist. "Unbidden be it," said the Spectre. "It is enough. I am here.

The proper, wise balancing
of one's whole life may depend upon the
feasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.

There is no magic method of beginning ... Take hold of your nerves, and jump.

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

Concentrate on something useful. Having decided to achieve a task, achieve it at all costs.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Talk about an ideal democracy! In the realm of time there is no aristocracy of wealth, and no aristocracy of intellect. Genius is never rewarded by even an extra hour a day. And there is no punishment. Waste your infinitely precious commodity as much as you will, and the supply will never be withheld from you. No mysterious power will say: - "This man is a fool, if not a knave. He does not deserve time; he shall be cut off at the meter." It is more certain than consols, and payment of income is not affected by Sundays. Moreover, you cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt! You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste to-morrow; it is kept for you. You cannot waste the next hour; it is kept for you

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.

This place is a regular whispering-gallery.

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.

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.

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.

What then? Are we only to buy the books that we read? The question has merely to be thus bluntly put, and it answers itself. All impassioned bookmen, except a few who devote their whole lives to reading, have rows of books on their shelves which they have never read, and which they never will read. I know that I have hundreds such. My eye rests on the works of Berkeley in three volumes, with a preface by the Right Honourable Arthur James Balfour. I cannot conceive the circumstances under which I shall ever read Berkeley; but I do not regret having bought him in a good edition, and I would buy him again if I had him not; for when I look at him some of his virtue passes into me; I am the better for him. A certain aroma of philosophy informs my soul, and I am less crude than I should otherwise be. This is not fancy, but fact.

[…..]

"Taking Berkeley simply as an instance, I will utilise him a little further. I ought to have read Berkeley, you say; just as I ought to have read Spenser, Ben Jonson, George Eliot, Victor Hugo. Not at all. There is no 'ought' about it. If the mass of obtainable first-class literature were, as it was perhaps a century ago, not too large to be assimilated by a man of ordinary limited leisure _in_ his leisure and during the first half of his life, then possibly there might be an 'ought' about it. But the mass has grown unmanageable, even by those robust professional readers who can 'grapple with whole libraries.' And I am not a prof

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

You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions.

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.

Humanity walks ever on a thin crust over terrific abysses.

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

The manner in which one single ray of light, one single precious hint, will clarify and energize the whole mental life of him who receives it, is among the most wonderful and heavenly of intellectual phenomena.

If my typical man wishes to live fully and completely he must, in his mind, arrange a day within a day. And this inner day, a Chinese box in a larger Chinese box, must begin at 6 p.m. and end at 10 a.m. It is a day of sixteen hours; and during all these sixteen hours he has nothing whatever to do but cultivate his body and his soul and his fellow men.

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.

Most people sleep themselves stupid.