Arnold Bennett Quotes - Page 2

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

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

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

I don't read my reviews, I measure them.

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 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

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

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

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

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.

The saxophone is the embodied spirit of beer.

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.

To my mind the most poignant mystical exhoration ever written is "Be still and know that I am God."

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