Top 80 Arnold Bennett Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Arnold Bennett

2. “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.”

— Arnold Bennett

3. “Ninety percent of the friction of daily life is caused by tone of voice.”

— Arnold Bennett

4. “You are not in charge of the universe; you are in charge of yourself.”

— Arnold Bennett

5. “It is easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is from the top.”

— Arnold Bennett

6. “Procrastination is suicide on the installment plan.”

— Arnold Bennett

7. “You wake up in the morning, and your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of un-manufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. No one can take it from you. And no one receives either more or less than you receive.”

— Arnold Bennett

8. “Always behave as if nothing had happened, no matter what has happened.”

— Arnold Bennett

9. “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.”

— Arnold Bennett

10. “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.”

— Arnold Bennett

11. “Good taste is better than bad taste, but bad taste is better than no taste.”

— Arnold Bennett

12. “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.”

— Arnold Bennett

13. “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.”

— Arnold Bennett

14. “Falsehood often lurks upon the tongue of him, who, by self-praise, seeks to enhance his value in the eyes of others.”

— Arnold Bennett

15. “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

16. “To my mind the most poignant mystical exhoration ever written is “Be still and know that I am God.””

— Arnold Bennett

17. “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.”

— Arnold Bennett

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

— Arnold Bennett

19. “We shall never have more time. We have, and always had, all the time there is.”

— Arnold Bennett

20. “The pleasure of doing a thing in the same way at the same time every day, and savoring it, should be noted.”

— Arnold Bennett

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

— Arnold Bennett

22. “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.”

— Arnold Bennett

23. “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.”

— Arnold Bennett

24. “The price of Justice is eternal publicity.”

— Arnold Bennett

25. “All wrong doing is done in the sincere belief that it is the best thing to do.”

— Arnold Bennett

26. “The saxophone is the embodied spirit of beer.”

— Arnold Bennett

27. “It is within the experience of everyone that when pleasure and pain reach a certain intensity they are indistinguishable.”

— Arnold Bennett

28. “Time is the explicable raw material of everything.”

— Arnold Bennett

29. “You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose.”

— Arnold Bennett

30. “Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.”

— Arnold Bennett

31. “Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission.”

— Arnold Bennett

32. “Prepare to live by all means, but for Heaven’s sake do not forget to live.”

— Arnold Bennett

33. “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.”

— Arnold Bennett

34. “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.”

— Arnold Bennett

35. “No mind, however loving, could bear to see plainly into all the recess of another mind.”

— Arnold Bennett

36. “Concentrate on something useful. Having decided to achieve a task, achieve it at all costs.”

— Arnold Bennett

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

— Arnold Bennett

38. “Beware of undertaking too much at the start. Be content with quite a little. Allow for accidents. Allow for human nature, especially your own.”

— Arnold Bennett

39. “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.”

— Arnold Bennett

40. “Most people sleep themselves stupid.”

— Arnold Bennett

41. “Saw Washington Monument. Phallic. Appalling. A national catastrophe.”

— Arnold Bennett

42. “A true friend is one who likes you despite your achievements.”

— Arnold Bennett

43. “At moments we are all artists.”

— Arnold Bennett

44. “During a long and varied career as a bachelor, I have noticed that marriage is the death of politeness between a man and a woman.”

— Arnold Bennett

45. “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.”

— Arnold Bennett

46. “It is only people of small stature who have to stand on their dignity.”

— Arnold Bennett

47. “Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism.”

— Arnold Bennett

48. “The great advantage of being in a rut is that when one is in a rut, one knows exactly where one is.”

— Arnold Bennett

49. “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.”

— Arnold Bennett

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

50. “I don’t read my reviews, I measure them.”

— Arnold Bennett