Best 93 quotes of Arnold Bennett on MyQuotes

A first-rate organizer is never in a hurry. He is never late. He always keeps up his sleeve a margin for the unexpected.

All wrong doing is done in the sincere belief that it is the best thing to do.

Always behave as if nothing had happened, no matter what has happened.

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

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

A true friend is one who likes you despite your achievements.

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.

Being a husband is a whole-time job.

Being a husband is a whole time job. That is why so many husbands fail. They cannot give their entire attention to it.

Beware of undertaking too much at the start. Be content with quite a little. Allow for accidents. Allow for human nature, especially your own.

Concentrate on something useful. Having decided to achieve a task, achieve it at all costs.

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.

During a long and varied career as a bachelor, dear spouse [mock platform manner], I have noticed that marriage is usually the death of politeness between a man and a woman.

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

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.

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.

Falsehood often lurks upon the tongue of him, who, by self-praise, seeks to enhance his value in the eyes of others.

Far from the madding crowd is a mistake on a honeymoon.... Solitude! Wherever you are, if you're on a honeymoon, you'll get quite as much solitude as is good for you every twenty-four hours. Constant change and distraction -- that's what wants arranging for. Solitude will arrange itself.

Good taste is better than bad taste, but bad taste is better than no taste.

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.

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.

I don't read my reviews, I measure them.

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.

If egotism means a terrific interest in one's self, egotism is absolutely essential to efficient living.

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.

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.

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

I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them, they might as well cut bread and butter. Unless you give at least 45 minutes of careful, fatiguing reflection upon what you are reading, your minutes are chiefly wasted.

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.

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.

I think it rather fine, this necessity for the tense bracing of the will before anything worth doing can be done. I rather like it myself. I feel it is to be the chief thing that differentiates me from the cat by the fire.

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.

It is easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is from the top.

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

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

It is within the experience of everyone that when pleasure and pain reach a certain intensity they are indistinguishable.

Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.

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

Journalists say a thing that they know isn't true, in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true.

Literature exists so that where one man has lived finely ten thousand may afterward live finely

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

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

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

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.

Ninety percent of the friction of daily life is caused by tone of voice.

No mind, however loving, could bear to see plainly into all the recess of another mind.

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.

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

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

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