Arnold Bennett
» Adversity » “It’s easier to go down a hill than up it but the view is much better at the top.”
» Blame » “There can be no doubt that the average man blames much more than he praises. His instinct is to blame. If he is satisfied he says nothing; if he is not, he most illogically kicks up a row.”
» Books and Reading » “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.”
» Censorship » “Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission.”
» Change » “Any change, even for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.”
» Cleverness » “Mother is far too clever to understand anything she does not like.”
» Creativity » “Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without ingenuity.”
» Effort » “It is easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is from the top.”
» Egotism » “If egotism means a terrific interest in one’s self, egotism is absolutely essential to efficient living.”
» Happiness » “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.”
» Hell » “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.”
» Inspiration » “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.”
» Mistakes » “All wrong doing is done in the sincere belief that it is the best thing to do.”
» Planning » “A first-rate Organizer is never in a hurry. He is never late. He always keeps up his sleeve a margin for the unexpected.”
» Planning » “We need a sense of the value of time — that is, of the best way to divide one’s time into one’s various activities.”
» Pleasure » “It is within the experience of everyone that when pleasure and pain reach a certain intensity they are indistinguishable.”
» Publicity » “The price of justice is eternal publicity.”
» Time and Time Management » “The supply of time is a daily miracle. You wake up in the morning and lo! Your purse is magnificently filled with 24 hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of life. It is yours! The most precious of your possessions.”
» Time and Time Management » “You wake up in the morning, and your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of un-manufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. No one can take it from you. And no one receives either more or less than you receive.”
» Travel and Tourism » “The traveler, however virginal and enthusiastic, does not enjoy an unbroken ecstasy. He has periods of gloom, periods when he asks himself the object of all these exertions, and puts the question whether or not he is really experiencing pleasure. At such times he suspects that he is not seeing the right things, that the characteristic, the right aspects of these strange scenes are escaping him. He looks forward dully to the days of his holiday yet to pass, and wonders how he will dispose of them. He is disgusted because his money is not more, his command of the language so slight, and his capacity for enjoyment so limited.”
» Virginity » “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.”
» Writers and Writing » “Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.”
