Arnold Bennett
Arnold Bennett
Enoch Arnold Bennettwas an English writer. He is best known as a novelist, but he also worked in other fields such as journalism, propaganda and film...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth27 May 1867
suicide procrastination funny-procrastination
Procrastination is suicide on the installment plan.
giving-up lying effort
If you imagine that you will be able to achieve your ideal by ingeniously planning out a timetable with a pen on a piece of paper, you had better give up hope at once.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.
men doors bored
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.
confused thinking details
You probably think of the orchestra as a heterogeneous mass of instruments producing a confused agreeable mass of sound. You do not listen for details because you have never trained your ears to listen to details.
matter behave ifs
Always behave as if nothing had happened, no matter what has happened.
book reading cutting
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.
past yield people
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.
stupid worry brain
Worry is evidence of an ill-controlled brain; it is merely a stupid waste of time in unpleasantness.
war years people
The war years count double. Things and people not actively in use age twice as fast.
time raw-materials materials
Time is the explicable raw material of everything.
inspiration ruts advantage
The great advantage of being in a rut is that when one is in a rut, one knows exactly where one is.
jobs husband whole
Being a husband is a whole-time job.
life sacrifice effort
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.
ideas firsts bricks
You can only acquire really useful general ideas by first acquiring particular ideas . . . You cannot make bricks without straw.