Arnold Bennett Quotes

The chief beauty about timeis that you cannot waste it in advance.The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you,as perfect, as unspoiled,as if you had never wasted or misapplieda single moment in all your life.You can turn over a new leaf every hourif you choose.

~ Arnold Bennett

The proper, wise balancingof one's whole life may depend upon thefeasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.

~ Arnold Bennett

Money is far commoner than time. When one reflects, one perceives that money is just about the commonest thing there is.

~ Arnold Bennett

Ardour in well-doing is a misleading and a treacherous thing. It cries out loudly for employment; you can't satisfy it at first; it wants more and more; it is eager to move mountains and divert the course of rivers. It isn't content till it perspires. And then, too often, when it feels the perspiration on its brow, it wearies all of a sudden and dies, without even putting itself to the trouble of saying, I've had enough of this.

~ Arnold Bennett

There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. To the cognition of the brain must be added the experience of the soul.

~ Arnold Bennett

You probably think of the orchestra as a heterogeneous mass of instrumentsproducing a confused agreeable massof sound. You do not listen for details because you have never trained your ears to listen to details.

~ Arnold Bennett

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.

~ Arnold Bennett

without the power to concentrate thatis to say, without the power to dictate to the brain its task and to ensure obedience true life is impossible. Mind control is the first element of a full existence.

~ Arnold Bennett

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.

~ Arnold Bennett

And since nothing whatever happens to us outside our own brain; since nothing hurt us or gives us pleasure except within the brain, the supreme importance of being able to control what goes on in that mysterious brain is patent.

~ Arnold Bennett

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

~ Arnold Bennett

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

~ Arnold Bennett

Any change even a change for the better is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.

~ Arnold Bennett

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

~ Arnold Bennett

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. ... Concentrate on something useful.

~ Arnold Bennett

The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labour is immense.

~ Arnold Bennett

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

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

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

~ Arnold Bennett

Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.

~ Arnold Bennett