Arnold Bennett
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.Collection: Heart
Saw Washington Monument. Phallic. Appalling. A national catastrophe.Collection: Washington Monument
You can only acquire really useful general ideas by first acquiring particular ideas . . . You cannot make bricks without straw.Collection: Ideas
I will never cease advising my friends and enemies to read poetry before anything.Collection: Enemy
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Mother
Being a husband is a whole-time job.Collection: Jobs
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.Collection: Long
All wrong doing is done in the sincere belief that it is the best thing to do.Collection: Funny
The second suggestion is to think as well as to read. I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them they might just as well cut bread-and-butter. They take to reading as better men take to drink. They fly through the shires of literature on a motor-car, their sole object being motion. They will tell you how many books they have read in a year. Unless you give at least 45 minutes to careful, fatiguing reflection (it is an awful bore at first) upon what you are reading, your 90 minutes of a night are chiefly wasted.Collection: Book
The proper, wise balancing of one's whole life may depend upon the feasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.Collection: Wise
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.Collection: Inspirational
Literature exists so that where one man has lived finely ten thousand may afterward live finelyCollection: Men
I don't read my reviews, I measure them.Collection: Book
There is no magic method of beginning... Take hold of your nerves, and jump.Collection: Magic
Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.Collection: Music
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.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Marriage
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.Collection: Cat
No mind, however loving, could bear to see plainly into all the recess of another mind.Collection: Mind
The pleasure of doing a thing in the same way at the same time every day, and savoring it, should be noted.Collection: Happiness
The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labour is immense.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Littles
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.Collection: Time
Worry is evidence of an ill-controlled brain; it is merely a stupid waste of time in unpleasantness.Collection: Stupid
Falsehood often lurks upon the tongue of him, who, by self-praise, seeks to enhance his value in the eyes of others.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Children
The saxophone is the embodied spirit of beer.Collection: Beer
Time is the explicable raw material of everything.Collection: Time
A man of sixty has spent twenty years in bed and over three years in eating.Collection: Birthday
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.Collection: Miracle
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.Collection: Calling
It is only people of small stature who have to stand on their dignity.Collection: People
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 themCollection: Children
To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking.Collection: Writing
Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.Collection: Art
If you've ever really been poor, you remain poor at heart all your life.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Baby
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.Collection: Important
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.Collection: Morning
As a rule people don't collect books; they let books collect themselves.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Life
A sense of the value of time... is an essential preliminary to efficient work; it is the only method of avoiding hurry.Collection: Essentials
Make love to every woman you meet; if you get five per cent of your outlay it's a good investment.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Mistake
Most people sleep themselves stupid.Collection: Stupid
Only a very gifted mind could cope singly with all the problems which present themselves in the perfecting of a home.Collection: Home