Quotes by Arnold Bennett

And since nothing whatever happens to us outside our own brain; since nothing hurt us or gives us pleasure except within the brain, the supreme importance of being able to control what goes on in that mysterious brain is patent.

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

A man of sixty has spent twenty years in bed and over three years in eating.

Any change even a change for the better is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.

No matter what has happened always behave as if nothing had happened.

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.

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

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

We shall never have more time. We have and have always had all the time there is. No object is served in waiting until next week or even until to-morrow. Keep going. ... Concentrate on something useful.

If youve ever really been poor you remain poor at heart all your life.

The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labour is immense.

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

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.

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.

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

Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.

“The proper, wise balancing of ones whole life may depend upon the feasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.”

“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.”

“Money is far commoner than time. When one reflects, one perceives that money is just about the commonest thing there is.”