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.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Planning
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.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: The Past
Always behave as if nothing had happened no matter what has happened.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Manners
It is within the experience of everyone that when pleasure and pain reach a certain intensity they are indistinguishable.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Pleasure
Well, my deliberate opinion is – it’s a jolly strange world.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Opinions
Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Attitude, Will Power, Censorship, Discipline
Beware of undertaking too much at the start. Be content with quite a little. Allow for accidents. Allow for human nature, especially your own.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Patience
It is well, when one is judging a friend, to remember that he is judging you with the same godlike and superior impartiality.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Judging, Friends and Friendship, Judgment, Friendship
Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Change
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.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Life
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.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Books, Reading
The real tragedy is the tragedy of the man who never in his life braces himself for his one supreme effort, who never stretches to his full capacity, never stands up to his full stature.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Effort
The price of justice is eternal publicity.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Justice
Good taste is better than bad taste, but bad taste is better than no taste.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Character
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.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Joy, Happiness
You wake up in the morning, and your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of un-manufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. No one can take it from you. And no one receives either more or less than you receive.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Time Management, Time
A first-rate Organizer is never in a hurry. He is never late. He always keeps up his sleeve a margin for the unexpected.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Planning
Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without ingenuity.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Creativity
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.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Ideas
Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Pessimism
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.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Inspiration, The Artist
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.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Worry
No mind, however loving, could bear to see plainly into all the recesses of another mind.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Mind, The Mind
We shall never have more time. We have, and have always had, all the time there is. No object is served in waiting until next week or even until to-morrow. Keep going day in and out. Concentrate on something useful. Having decided to achieve a task, achieve it at all costs.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Achievements, Time, Value of Time, Time Management, Productivity
The traveler, however virginal and enthusiastic, does not enjoy an unbroken ecstasy. He has periods of gloom, periods when he asks himself the object of all these exertions, and puts the question whether or not he is really experiencing pleasure. At such times he suspects that he is not seeing the right things, that the characteristic, the right aspects of these strange scenes are escaping him. He looks forward dully to the days of his holiday yet to pass, and wonders how he will dispose of them. He is disgusted because his money is not more, his command of the language so slight, and his capacity for enjoyment so limited.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Tourism, Travel
Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writers, Writing
All wrong doing is done in the sincere belief that it is the best thing to do.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Mistakes
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.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Sex
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.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Hell
If egotism means a terrific interest in one’s self, egotism is absolutely essential to efficient living.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Ego, Egotism
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Israel Zangwill English Writer, Political Activist
- Doris Lessing British Novelist, Poet
- Dodie Smith British Novelist
- Gladys Bronwyn Stern British Novelist
- Graham Greene British Novelist
- Agatha Christie British Novelist
- Dorothy L. Sayers English Novelist, Playwright
- H. G. Wells English Novelist, Historian
- Mary Elizabeth Braddon English Novelist
- Beryl Bainbridge British Novelist
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