Quotes from Arnold Bennett

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The parents exist to teach the child, but also they must learn what the child has to teach them; and the child has a very great deal to teach them

Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission.

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

To my mind the most poignant mystical exhoration ever written is "Be still and know that I am God."

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

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

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.

The great advantage of being in a rut is that when one is in a rut, one knows exactly where one is.

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.

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.

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

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

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

The price of justice is eternal publicity.