British novelist & playwright (1867-1931)
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
In a woman whose chief capital is her beauty, to be forty is a crime against society.
ARNOLD BENNETT
The Gates of Wrath
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
Good taste is better than bad taste, but bad taste is better than no taste, and men without individuality have no taste--at any rate no taste that they can impose on their publics.
ARNOLD BENNETT
Evening Standard, August 21, 1930
Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.
ARNOLD BENNETT
The Journal of Arnold Bennett
The foundation of England's greatness is that Englishmen hate to look fools.
ARNOLD BENNETT
Tales of the Five Towns
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
Humanity walks ever on a thin crust over terrific abysses.
ARNOLD BENNETT
The Old Wives' Tale
Literature can appeal to the soul only through the mind. Music goes direct. Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.
ARNOLD BENNETT
Sacred and Profane Love