British novelist & playwright (1867-1931)
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
Literary Taste: How to Form It
To the artist is sometimes granted a sudden, transient insight.... 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
The Journal of Arnold Bennett
Literature's always a good card to play for Honours. It makes people think that Cabinet ministers are educated.
ARNOLD BENNETT
The Title
A failure or so, in itself, would not matter, if it did not incur a loss of self-esteem and of self-confidence. But just as nothing succeeds like success, so nothing fails like failure.
ARNOLD BENNETT
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day
Being a husband is a whole-time job. That is why so many husbands fail. They can't give their entire attention to it.
ARNOLD BENNETT
The Title
And, 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.
ARNOLD BENNETT
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day
Humanity walks ever on a thin crust over terrific abysses.
ARNOLD BENNETT
The Old Wives' Tale
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.
ARNOLD BENNETT
The Old Wives' Tale
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.
ARNOLD BENNETT
Things That Have Interested Me
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
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day
Who am I to judge? Who are you to pass verdicts? Who puts us on the bench? Have we heard all the evidence, or the hundredth part of it? Is there any possibility of us doing so? Are we not all equally in the dock? There is something tragically comic about the spectacle of one human being judging another.
ARNOLD BENNETT
How to Make the Best of Life
For me there is no supremacy in art. When fifty artists have contrived to be supreme, supremacy is impossible.
ARNOLD BENNETT
Sacred and Profane Love
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
The Journal of 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
The Journal of Arnold Bennett
When you are born you are done for, in the matter of your temperament. The colour of your eyes may alter, generally does; but your temperament won't. It will show itself in your last breath.
ARNOLD BENNETT
How to Make the Best of Life
Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.
ARNOLD BENNETT
The Journal of Arnold Bennett
In a woman whose chief capital is her beauty, to be forty is a crime against society.
ARNOLD BENNETT
The Gates of Wrath
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
Self and Self-Management
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
The Best of Arnold Bennett
A man's duty is to keep his end up.
ARNOLD BENNETT
How to Make the Best of Life