Quotes from bennett arnold iii

Good taste is better than bad taste, but bad taste is better than no taste, and men without individuality have no taste--at any rate no taste that they can impose on their publics.

Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism. Indeed, I think it must be more agreeable, must have a more real savor, than optimism--from the way in which pessimists abandon themselves to it.

Worry is a form of friction. The task of the expert in life is to run his machine with the maximum of activity and the minimum of friction. If he stops or slows the machine because he cannot otherwise deal with the friction, then life has beaten him.

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.

Literature can appeal to the soul only through the mind. Music goes direct. Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.

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.

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

Yes books are valuable. But not reading of books will take the place of a daily, candid, honest examination of what one has recently done, and what one is about to do -- of a steady looking at one's self in the face (disconcerting though the sight may be).

Worry sits on the countenance of nearly every season ticket-holder in the morning train and in the evening train. You see it in the streets, offices, and restaurants, and you can even meet it in the country lanes. The habit of worrying infallibly leaves its mark, and the mark is there for all to notice.

In a woman whose chief capital is her beauty, to be forty is a crime against society.