Arnold Bennett Quotes

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

If you've ever really been poor you remain poor at heart all your life. I've often walked when I could very well afford to take a taxi because I simply couldn't bring myself to waste the shilling it would cost.

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.

The chief beauty about 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 unspoiled, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your life. You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The chances are that you have already come to believe that happiness is unattainable. But men have attained it. And they have attained it by realizing that happiness does not spring from the procuring of physical or mental pleasure, but from the development of reason and the adjustment of conduct to principles.

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.

Procrastination is suicide on the installment plan.

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

The price of Justice is eternal publicity.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.