Quotes by Arnold Bennett

A cause may be inconvenient, but it's magnificent. It's like champagne or high heels, and one must be prepared to suffer for it.
– Arnold Bennett
Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.
– Arnold Bennett
Being a husband is a whole-time job. That is why so many husbands fail. They cannot give their entire attention to it.
– Arnold Bennett
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
Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.
– 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
If egotism means a terrific interest in one's self, egotism is absolutely essential to efficient living.
– Arnold Bennett
It is easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is from the top.
– Arnold Bennett
It is well, when judging a friend, to remember that he is judging you with the same godlike and superior impartiality.
– Arnold Bennett
Mother is far too clever to understand anything she does not like.
– Arnold Bennett
Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without ingenuity.
– Arnold Bennett
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
Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism.
– Arnold Bennett
The moment you're born you're done for.
– 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
Well, my deliberate opinion is - it's a jolly strange world.
– Arnold Bennett
Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission.
– Arnold Bennett
A man of sixty has spent twenty years in bed and over three years in eating.
– Arnold Bennett
Falsehood often lurks upon the tongue of him, who, by self-praise, seeks to enhance his value in the eyes of others.
– Arnold Bennett
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
The best cure for worry, depression, melancholy, brooding, is to go deliberately forth and try to lift with one's sympathy the gloom of somebody else.
– Arnold Bennett
We shall never have more time. We have, and always had, all the time there is. No object is served in waiting until next week or even until tomorrow. Keep going... Concentrate on something useful.
– 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
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.
– Arnold Bennett