Arnold Bennett

You probably think of the orchestra as a heterogeneous mass of instrumentsproducing a confused agreeable massof sound. You do not listen for details because you have never trained your ears to listen to details.

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.

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

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

Ardour in well-doing is a misleading and a treacherous thing. It cries out loudly for employment; you can't satisfy it at first; it wants more and more; it is eager to move mountains and divert the course of rivers. It isn't content till it perspires. And then, too often, when it feels the perspiration on its brow, it wearies all of a sudden and dies, without even putting itself to the trouble of saying, "I've had enough of this.

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

The proper, wise balancingof one's whole life may depend upon thefeasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.

Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.

Mother is far too clever to understand anything she does not like.

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.

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.

Worry is evidence of an ill-controlled brain it is merely a stupid waste of time in unpleasantness.

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

If you've ever really been poor you remain poor at heart all your life.

We shall never have more time. We have and have always had all the time there is. No object is served in waiting until next week or even until to-morrow. Keep going. ... Concentrate on something useful.

A sense of the value of time ... is an essential preliminary to efficient work it is the only method of avoiding hurry.

It is well when judging a friend to remember that he is judging you with the same godlike and superior impartiality.

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.