Arnold Bennett
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.Collection: Knowledge
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.Collection: Truth
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.Collection: Happiness
Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.Collection: Change
Mother is far too clever to understand anything she does not like.Collection: Mom
It is easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is from the top.
It is well, when judging a friend, to remember that he is judging you with the same godlike and superior impartiality.
Always behave as if nothing had happened, no matter what has happened.
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.
The great advantage of being in a rut is that when one is in a rut, one knows exactly where one is.
Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission.
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.
Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism.
The moment you're born you're done for.
A first-rate organizer is never in a hurry. He is never late. He always keeps up his sleeve a margin for the unexpected.
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.
The price of justice is eternal publicity.
Well, my deliberate opinion is - it's a jolly strange world.
Being a husband is a whole-time job. That is why so many husbands fail. They cannot give their entire attention to it.
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.
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.
Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without ingenuity.
If egotism means a terrific interest in one's self, egotism is absolutely essential to efficient living.
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.
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.Collection: Motivational
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.Collection: Reading
Ninety percent of the friction of daily life is caused by tone of voice.Collection: Communication
You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. No one can take it from you. It is unstealable. And no one receives either more or less than you receive.Collection: Good Morning
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.Collection: Depression
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.Collection: Real
You are not in charge of the universe; you are in charge of yourself.Collection: Universe
A true friend is one who likes you despite your achievements.Collection: True Friend
At moments we are all artists.Collection: Artist
Procrastination is suicide on the installment plan.Collection: Suicide
Beware of undertaking too much at the start. Be content with quite a little. Allow for accidents. Allow for human nature, especially your own.Collection: Littles
Good taste is better than bad taste, but bad taste is better than no taste.Collection: Character
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.Collection: Past
Concentrate on something useful. Having decided to achieve a task, achieve it at all costs.Collection: Procrastination
It is within the experience of everyone that when pleasure and pain reach a certain intensity they are indistinguishable.Collection: Pain
To my mind the most poignant mystical exhoration ever written is "Be still and know that I am God."Collection: Faith
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.Collection: Reading
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.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Sleep
Prepare to live by all means, but for Heaven's sake do not forget to live.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Faithful
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.Collection: Giving
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.Collection: Heart