Quotes from bennett arnold ii

The manner in which one single ray of light, one single precious hint, will clarify and energize the whole mental life of him who receives it, is among the most wonderful and heavenly of intellectual phenomena.

A failure or so, in itself, would not matter, if it did not incur a loss of self-esteem and of self-confidence. But just as nothing succeeds like success, so nothing fails like failure.

For me there is no supremacy in art. When fifty artists have contrived to be supreme, supremacy is impossible.

Literature's always a good card to play for Honours. It makes people think that Cabinet ministers are educated.

The pleasure of doing a thing in the same way at the same time every day, and savoring it, should be noted.

To the artist is sometimes granted a sudden, transient insight.... A flash, and where previously the brain held a dead fact, the soul grasps a living truth! At moments we are all artists.

The chances are that you have already come to believe that happiness is unattainable. But men have attained it. And they have attained it by realizing that happiness does not spring from the procuring of physical or mental pleasure, but from the development of reason and the adjustment of conduct to principles.

Who am I to judge? Who are you to pass verdicts? Who puts us on the bench? Have we heard all the evidence, or the hundredth part of it? Is there any possibility of us doing so? Are we not all equally in the dock? There is something tragically comic about the spectacle of one human being judging another.

And, 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 labour is immense.

The foundation of England's greatness is that Englishmen hate to look fools.

A man's duty is to keep his end up.

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.

When you are born you are done for, in the matter of your temperament. The colour of your eyes may alter, generally does; but your temperament won't. It will show itself in your last breath.

A test of a first-rate work, and a test of your sincerity in calling it a first-rate work, is that you finish it.