Quotes from Arnold Bennett

a life in which conduct does not fairly well accord with principles is a silly life; and that conduct can only be made to accord with principles by means of daily examination, reflection, and resolution.

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.

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

We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is.

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.

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.

Jane Austen? I feel that I am approaching dangerous ground. The reputation of Jane Austen is surrounded by cohorts of defenders who are ready to do murder for their sacred cause.

humanity walks ever on a thin crust over terrific abysses.

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.

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

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

The manner of his life was of no importance. What affected her was that he had once been young. That he had grown old, and was now dead. That was all. Youth and vigour had come to that. Youth and vigour always came to that. Everything came to that.

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.

You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose.

Good clothes, when put to the test, survive a change in fortune, as a Roman arch survives the luxury of departed empire.

Worry is evidence of an ill-controlled brain; it is merely a stupid waste of time in unpleasantness.

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.

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.

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.

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

Time is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible, without it nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it.

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

Being a husband is a whole-time job.

Time is the explicable raw material of everything.