Arnold Bennett Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

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

I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them, they might as well cut bread and butter. Unless you give at least 45 minutes of careful, fatiguing reflection upon what you are reading, your minutes are chiefly wasted.

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. No one can take it from you. It is unstealable. And no one receives either more or less than you receive.

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

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 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.

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.

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

Procrastination is suicide on the installment plan.

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.

At moments we are all artists.

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

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

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

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.

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

During a long and varied career as a bachelor, dear spouse [mock platform manner], I have noticed that marriage is usually the death of politeness between a man and a woman.

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.

The price of Justice is eternal publicity.

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