105+ Arnold Bennett Quotes On Change, Realistic And Observant

Arnold Bennett was an English novelist, playwright, and essayist. He was born in Hanley, Staffordshire, and was educated at Newcastle-under-Lyme Grammar School. His best-known works include Clayhanger, The Old Wives' Tale, and Anna of the Five Towns. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Arnold Bennett on change, realistic, observant.

Top 10 Arnold Bennett Quotes

1. 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.
2. It's easier to go down a hill than up it but the view is much better at the top.
3. Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.
4. Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission.
5. It is a disturbing truth that even undertakers die sometimes.
6. 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.
7. Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.
8. The best cure for worry, depression, melancholy, brooding, is to go deliberately forth and try to lift with one's sympathy the gloom of somebody else.
9. Worry is evidence of an ill-controlled brain; it is merely a stupid waste of time in unpleasantness.
10. 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.

Arnold Bennett Short Quotes

• It is easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is from the top.
• A man of sixty has spent twenty years in bed and over three years in eating.
• The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labour is immense.
• The saxophone is the embodied spirit of beer.
• Procrastination is suicide on the installment plan.
• Well, my deliberate opinion is - it's a jolly strange world.
• Saw Washington Monument. Phallic. Appalling. A national catastrophe.
• A true friend is one who likes you despite your achievements.
• The price of Justice is eternal publicity.
• Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism.

Arnold Bennett Quotes About Life

If you've ever really been poor you remain poor at heart all your life. I've often walked when I could very well afford to take a taxi because I simply couldn't bring myself to waste the shilling it would cost. — Arnold Bennett

The real Tragedy is the tragedy of the man who never in his life braces himself for his one supreme effort-he never stretches to his full capacity, never stands up to his full stature. — Arnold Bennett

The chief beauty about time is that you cannot waste it in advance. The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoiled, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your life. You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose. — Arnold Bennett

The proper, wise balancing of one's whole life may depend upon the feasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour. — Arnold Bennett

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

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. — Arnold Bennett

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

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. — Arnold Bennett

Which of us is not saying to himself which of us has not been saying to himself all his life: " I shall alter that when I have a little more time"? We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is. — Arnold Bennett

The makers of literature are those who have seen and felt the miraculous interestingness of the universe. If you have formed...literary taste...your life will be one long ecstasy of denying that the world is a dull place. — Arnold Bennett

Arnold Bennett Quotes About Morning

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. — Arnold Bennett

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. — Arnold Bennett

In search of ideas I spent yesterday morning in walking about, and went to the stores and bought things in four departments. A wonderful and delightful way of spending time. I think this sort of activity does stimulate creative ideas. — Arnold Bennett

Arnold Bennett Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Arnold Bennett

Worry is evidence of an ill-controlled brain; it is merely a stupid waste of time in unpleasantness. If men and women practiced mental calisthenics as they do physical calisthenics, they would purge their brains of this foolishness. — Arnold Bennett

Falsehood often lurks upon the tongue of him, who, by self-praise, seeks to enhance his value in the eyes of others. — Arnold Bennett

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

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. — Arnold Bennett

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. — Arnold Bennett

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

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. — Arnold Bennett

A cause may be inconvenient, but it's magnificent. It's like champagne or high heels, and one must be prepared to suffer for it. — Arnold Bennett

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 labor is immense. — Arnold Bennett

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. — Arnold Bennett

You probably think of the orchestra as a heterogeneous mass of instruments producing a confused agreeable mass of sound. You do not listen for details because you have never trained your ears to listen to details. — Arnold Bennett

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

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. — Arnold Bennett

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

I do want an expensive honeymoon. Not because I'm extravagant, but because a honeymoon is a solemn, important thing ... a symbol. And it ought to be done -- well, adequately. — Arnold Bennett

The moment you're born you're done for. — Arnold Bennett

Good taste is better than bad taste, but bad taste is better than no taste. — Arnold Bennett

It is within the experience of everyone that when pleasure and pain reach a certain intensity they are indistinguishable. — Arnold Bennett

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 — Arnold Bennett

All wrong doing is done in the sincere belief that it is the best thing to do. — Arnold Bennett

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

No mind, however loving, could bear to see plainly into all the recess of another mind. — Arnold Bennett

Being a husband is a whole-time job. — Arnold Bennett

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. — Arnold Bennett

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

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

Great wealth may be to its owner a blessing or a curse. Alas! I fear it is too often the latter. It hardens the heart, blunts the finer susceptibilities, and transforms into a fiend what under more favourable circumstances might have been a human being. — Arnold Bennett

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. — Arnold Bennett

A sense of the value of time... is an essential preliminary to efficient work; it is the only method of avoiding hurry. — Arnold Bennett

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

The only way to write a great book is to write it with the eyes of a child who sees things for the first time. — Arnold Bennett

A first-rate Organizer is never in a hurry. He is never late. He always keeps up his sleeve a margin for the unexpected. — Arnold Bennett

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

Far from the madding crowd is a mistake on a honeymoon.... Solitude! Wherever you are, if you're on a honeymoon, you'll get quite as much solitude as is good for you every twenty-four hours. Constant change and distraction -- that's what wants arranging for. Solitude will arrange itself. — Arnold Bennett

Nearly all bookish people are snobs, and especially the more enlightened among them. They are apt to assume that if a writer has immense circulation, if he is enjoyed by plain persons, and if he can fill several theatres at once, he cannont possibly be worth reading and merits only indifference and disdain. — Arnold Bennett

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

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking. — Arnold Bennett

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. Cherish and burnish this faculty of seeing crudely, simply, artlessly, ignorantly; of seeing like a baby or a lunatic, who lives each moment by itself and tarnishes by the present no remembrance of the past. — Arnold Bennett

The test of a first-rate work, and a test of your sincerity in calling it a first-rate work, is that you finish it. — Arnold Bennett

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. — Arnold Bennett

Time is the explicable raw material of everything. — Arnold Bennett

I ought to reflect again and again, and yet again, that the beings that I have to steer are just as inevitable in the scheme of evolution as I am myself; have just as much right to be themselves as I am entitled to; and they all deserve from me as much sympathy as I give to myself. — Arnold Bennett

The people who live in the past must yield to the people who live in the future. Otherwise the world would begin to turn the other way round. — Arnold Bennett

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. — Arnold Bennett

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

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. — Arnold Bennett

As a rule people don't collect books; they let books collect themselves. — Arnold Bennett

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

Make love to every woman you meet; if you get five per cent of your outlay it's a good investment. — Arnold Bennett

Prepare to live by all means, but for Heaven's sake do not forget to live. — Arnold Bennett

You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the magic tissue of the universe of your life. No one can take it from you. No one receives either more or less than you receive. Waste your infinitely precious commodity as much as you will, and the supply will never be withheld from you. Moreover, you cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt. You can only waste the passing movements. You cannot waste tomorrow. It is kept for you. — Arnold Bennett

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. — Arnold Bennett

I think it rather fine, this necessity for the tense bracing of the will before anything worth doing can be done. I rather like it myself. I feel it is to be the chief thing that differentiates me from the cat by the fire. — Arnold Bennett

At moments we are all artists. — Arnold Bennett

Concentrate on something useful. Having decided to achieve a task, achieve it at all costs. — Arnold Bennett

One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change - not rest, except in sleep. — Arnold Bennett

You can only acquire really useful general ideas by first acquiring particular ideas . . . You cannot make bricks without straw. — Arnold Bennett

I don't read my reviews, I measure them. — Arnold Bennett

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. — Arnold Bennett

The war years count double. Things and people not actively in use age twice as fast. — Arnold Bennett

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

Most people sleep themselves stupid. — Arnold Bennett

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

I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them, they might as well cut bread and butter. Unless you give at least 45 minutes of careful, fatiguing reflection upon what you are reading, your minutes are chiefly wasted. — Arnold Bennett

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

The most important preliminary to the task of arranging one's life so that one may live fully and comfortably within one's daily budget of 24 hours is the calm realization of the extreme difficulty of the task, of the sacrifices and the endless effort which it demands. — Arnold Bennett

There is no magic method of beginning... Take hold of your nerves, and jump. — Arnold Bennett

You are not in charge of the universe; you are in charge of yourself. — Arnold Bennett

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. — Arnold Bennett

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

It is only people of small stature who have to stand on their dignity. — Arnold Bennett

Life Lessons by Arnold Bennett

1. Arnold Bennett teaches us to be resilient in the face of adversity and to never give up on our dreams. He also encourages us to make the most of our time, to be creative and to take risks in order to achieve our goals. Lastly, he reminds us to be kind to ourselves and to others, and to appreciate the beauty of life.