Arnold Bennett Quotes

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

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

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.

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

The best cure for worry, depression, melancholy, brooding, is to go deliberately forth and try to lift with one's sympathy the gloom of somebody else.

Worry is evidence of an ill-controlled brain; it is merely a stupid waste of time in unpleasantness.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Ninety percent of the friction of daily life is caused by tone of voice.

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

The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labour is immense.

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

The saxophone is the embodied spirit of beer.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Procrastination is suicide on the installment plan.

If you've ever really been poor, you remain poor at heart all your life.

The price of Justice is eternal publicity.

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

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

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

Saw Washington Monument. Phallic. Appalling. A national catastrophe.

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.

Beware of undertaking too much at the start. Be content with quite a little. Allow for accidents. Allow for human nature, especially your own.

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

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

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

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

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

You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose.

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

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.

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

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

It is difficult to make a reputation, but is even more difficult seriously to mar a reputation once properly made --- so faithful is the public.

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

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.

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.

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

Being a husband is a whole-time job.