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Adversity
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It's easier to go down a hill than up it but the view is much better at the top.
-Arnold Bennett
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Artist, The
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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
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Authors & Writing
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Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.
-Arnold Bennett
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Blame
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There can be no doubt that the average man blames much more than he praises. His instinct is to blame. If he is satisfied he says nothing; if he is not, he most illogically kicks up a row.
-Arnold Bennett
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Censorship
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Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission.
-Arnold Bennett
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Change
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Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.
-Arnold Bennett, "The Arnold Bennett Calendar"
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Creativity
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Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without ingenuity.
-Arnold Bennett
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Effort
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It is easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is from the top.
-Arnold Bennett
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Ego
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If egotism means a terrific interest in one's self, egotism is absolutely essential to efficient living.
-Arnold Bennett
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Goals
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Having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all costs of tedium and distaste. The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labor is immense.
-Arnold Bennett
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Happiness
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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
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Hell
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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
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Intelligence
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Mother is far too clever to understand anything she does not like.
-Arnold Bennett
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Judging, Judgment
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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
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Justice
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The price of Justice is eternal publicity.
-Arnold Bennett, Things That Have Interested Me,
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Life
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You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the magic tissue of the universe of your life. No one can take it from you. No one receives either more or less than you receive. Waste your infinitely precious commodity as much as you will, and the supply will never be withheld from you. Moreover, you cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt. You can only waste the passing movements. You cannot waste tomorrow. It is kept for you.
-Arnold Bennett
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Mistakes
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All wrong doing is done in the sincere belief that it is the best thing to do.
-Arnold Bennett
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Past, the
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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
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Patience
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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
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Pessimism
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Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism.
-Arnold Bennett
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Planning
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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
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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
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Pleasure
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It is within the experience of everyone that when pleasure and pain reach a certain intensity they are indistinguishable.
-Arnold Bennett
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Reading
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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, The Journals of Arnold Bennett, 1932.
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Sex
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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
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Books by and about Arnold Bennett