Arnold Bennett Quotes - Page 3

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

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.

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

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

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 only way to write a great book is to write it with the eyes of a child who sees things for the first time.

Time is the explicable raw material of everything.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 only people of small stature who have to stand on their dignity.

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.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking.

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

Nearly all bookish people are snobs, and especially the more enlightened among them. They are apt to assume that if a writer has immense circulation, if he is enjoyed by plain persons, and if he can fill several theatres at once, he cannont possibly be worth reading and merits only indifference and disdain.

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; in its right, authentic colors; without making comparisons. Cherish and burnish this faculty of seeing crudely, simply, artlessly, ignorantly; of seeing like a baby or a lunatic, who lives each moment by itself and tarnishes by the present no remembrance of the past.

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

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.

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

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.

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

The most important preliminary to the task of arranging one's life so that one may live fully and comfortably within one's daily budget of 24 hours is the calm realization of the extreme difficulty of the task, of the sacrifices and the endless effort which it demands.

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