Arnold Bennett Quotes - Page 4

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

Make love to every woman you meet; if you get five per cent of your outlay it's a good investment.

Most people sleep themselves stupid.

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

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

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.

Prepare to live by all means, but for Heaven's sake do not forget to live.

I ought to reflect again and again, and yet again, that the beings that I have to steer are just as inevitable in the scheme of evolution as I am myself; have just as much right to be themselves as I am entitled to; and they all deserve from me as much sympathy as I give to myself.

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 war years count double. Things and people not actively in use age twice as fast.

If you imagine that you will be able to achieve your ideal by ingeniously planning out a timetable with a pen on a piece of paper, you had better give up hope at once.If you are not prepared for discouragements and disillusions; if you will not be content with a small result for a big effort, then do not begin. Lie down again and resume the uneasy doze which you call your existence.

One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change - not rest, except in sleep.

The manner in which one single ray of light, one single precious hint, will clarify and energize the whole mental life of him who receives it, is among the most wonderful and heavenly of intellectual phenomena.

Great wealth may be to its owner a blessing or a curse. Alas! I fear it is too often the latter. It hardens the heart, blunts the finer susceptibilities, and transforms into a fiend what under more favourable circumstances might have been a human being.

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.

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

You can only acquire really useful general ideas by first acquiring particular ideas . . . You cannot make bricks without straw.

I will never cease advising my friends and enemies to read poetry before anything.

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.

The man who begins to go to bed forty minutes before he opens his bedroom door is bored; that is to say, he is not living.

Being a husband is a whole-time job.

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.

The makers of literature are those who have seen and felt the miraculous interestingness of the universe. If you have formed...literary taste...your life will be one long ecstasy of denying that the world is a dull place.