Top 80 Arnold Bennett Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “A man of sixty has spent twenty years in bed and over three years in eating.”

— Arnold Bennett

52. “To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking.”

— Arnold Bennett

53. “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.”

— Arnold Bennett

54. “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.”

— Arnold Bennett

55. “I’m not ruthless. It’s common sense that’s ruthless.”

— Arnold Bennett

56. “Only a very gifted mind could cope singly with all the problems which present themselves in the perfecting of a home.”

— Arnold Bennett

57. “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.”

— Arnold Bennett

58. “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.”

— Arnold Bennett

59. “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.”

— Arnold Bennett

60. “Being a husband is a whole-time job.”

— Arnold Bennett

61. “The moment you’re born you’re done for.”

— Arnold Bennett

62. “The war years count double. Things and people not actively in use age twice as fast.”

— Arnold Bennett

63. “Make love to every woman you meet; if you get five per cent of your outlay it’s a good investment.”

— Arnold Bennett

64. “If you’ve ever really been poor, you remain poor at heart all your life.”

— Arnold Bennett

65. “I will never cease advising my friends and enemies to read poetry before anything.”

— Arnold Bennett

66. “The entire landscape was illuminated and transformed by these unique pyrotechnics of labour atoning for its grime, and dull, weird sounds, as of the breathings and sighings of gigantic nocturnal creatures, filled the enchanted air.”

— Arnold Bennett

67. “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.”

— Arnold Bennett

68. “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.”

— Arnold Bennett

69. “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.”

— Arnold Bennett

70. “There was something magnificent in dire tragedy, in the terror of it, in the necessity which it laid upon everybody to behave nobly and efficiently.”

— Arnold Bennett

71. “As a rule people don’t collect books; they let books collect themselves.”

— Arnold Bennett

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

— Arnold Bennett

73. “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.”

— Arnold Bennett

74. “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.”

— Arnold Bennett

75. “We go about in a world where secret influences are continually at work for us or against us, and we do not suspect their existence, because we have no imagination. For it needs imagination to perceive the truth – that is why the greatest poets are always the greatest teachers.”

— Arnold Bennett

76. “One may have spent one’s time badly, but one did spend it; one did do something with it, however ill-advised that something may have been. To do something else means a change of habits.”

— Arnold Bennett

77. “Literature exists so that where one man has lived finely ten thousand may afterward live finely.”

— Arnold Bennett

78. “And if you don’t like that you can acquaint yourself with the axioms that neither you nor anybody else are the centre of the universe and that what you call complications are simply another name for life itself. Worry is life, and life is worry. And the absence of worry is death.”

— Arnold Bennett

79. “I hate being asked what I want. Because I never know.”

— Arnold Bennett

80. “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

81. “Meat may go up in price – it has done – but books won’t. Admission to picture galleries and concerts and so forth will remain quite low. The views from Richmond Hill or Hindhead, or along Pall Mall at sunset, the smell of the earth, the taste of fruit and of kisses – these things are unaffected by the machinations of trusts and the hysteria of stock exchanges.”

— Arnold Bennett

82. “Good fiction is autobiography dressed in the colours of all mankind.”

— Arnold Bennett

83. “You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste to-morrow; it is kept for you.”

— Arnold Bennett

84. “It is always the man who has tasted life who demands more of it.”

— Arnold Bennett