Arnold Bennett

“ Every bookish person has indulgently observed the artless absorption and surrender with which a “man of action” reads when by chance a book captures him, his temporary monomania, his insistence that the bookish person shall share his joy, and his impatience at any exhibition of indifference. For the moment the terrible man of action is a child again; he who has straddled the world is like a provincial walking with open-mouthed delight through the streets of the capital. ”

“ I would point out that literature by no means comprises the whole field of knowledge, and that the disturbing thirst to improve one’s self—to increase one’s knowledge—may well be slaked quite apart from literature.
Nineteen
The public, by its casual approval, may give notoriety and a vogue which passes, but it is incapable of the sustained ardour of appreciation which alone results in authentic renown. ”

“ To hear a master play a scale, to catch that measured, tranquil succession of notes, each a different jewel of equal splendour, each dying precisely when the next was born—this is to perceive at last what music is made of, to have glimpses of the divine magic that is the soul of the divinest art. ”

“ It is huge and simple and slow in mental processes, like a good-humoured giant, easy to please and grateful for diversion. But it has a keen sense of its own dignity; it will not be trifled with; it resents for ever the tongue in the cheek. ”

“ There is the beauty of light and joy and strength exulting; but there is also the beauty of shade, of sorrow and sadness, and of humility oppressed. The spirit of the sublime dwells not only in the high and remote; it shines unperceived amid all the usual meannesses of our daily existence. ”

“ Train journeys have too often been sorrowful for me, so much so that the conception itself of a train, crawling over the country like a snake, or flying across it like a winged monster, fills me with melancholy. Trains loaded with human parcels of sadness and illusion and brief joy, wandering about, crossing, and occasionally colliding in the murk of existence ”

“ To utter a jeremiad upon the decadence of taste, to declare that literature is going to the dogs because a fourth-rate novel has been called a masterpiece and has made someone’s fortune, would be absurd. I have a strong faith that taste is as good as ever it was, and that literature will continue on its way undisturbed.
Fourteen
There is a loveliness of so imperious, absolute, dazzling a kind that it banishes from the hearts of men all moral conceptions, all considerations of right and wrong, and leaves therein nothing but worship and desire. ”

“ In England, nearly all the most interesting people are social reformers: and the only circles of society in which you are not bored, in which there is real conversation, are the circles of social reform. ”

“ Young writers wander forth searching for style, as one searches for that which is hidden. They might employ themselves as profitably in looking for the noses on their faces. For style is personal, as much a portion of one’s self as the voice. ”

“ The voice of this spirit says that it has lost every illusion about life, and that life seems only the more beautiful. It says that activity is but another form of contemplation, pain but another form of pleasure, power but another form of weakness, hate but another form of love, and that it is well these things should be so. ”

“ Everyone who has driven a motor-car knows the uncanny sensation that ensues when for the first time in your life you engage the clutch, and the Thing beneath you begins mysteriously and formidably to move. ”

“ All who look into their experience will admit that the failure to replace old habits by new ones is due to the fact that at the critical moment the brain does not remember; it simply forgets.
Seventeen
Many writers, and many clever writers, use the art of literature merely to gain an end which is connected with some different art, or with no art. Such a writer, finding himself burdened with a message prophetic, didactic, or reforming, discovers suddenly that he has the imaginative gift, and makes his imagination the servant of his intellect, or of emotions which are not artistic emotions. ”

“ It is as well not to chatter too much about what one is doing, and not to betray a too-pained sadness at the spectacle of a whole world deliberately wasting so many hours out of every day, and therefore never really living. It will be found, ultimately, that in taking care of one’s self one has quite all one can do. ”

“ Unite the colossal with the gaudy, and you will not achieve the sublime; but, unless you are deterred by humility and a sense of humour, you may persuade yourself that you have done so, and certainly most people will credit you with the genuine feat. ”

“ If you will but live, it cries, that grave but yet passionate voice—if you will but live! Were there a heaven, and you reached it, you could do no more than live. The true heaven is here where you live, where you strive and lose, and weep and laugh. ”

“ Further, the significance and the worth of literature are to be comprehended and assessed in the same way as the significance and the worth of any other phenomenon: by the exercise of common-sense. Common-sense will tell you that nobody, not even a genius, can be simultaneously vulgar and distinguished, or beautiful and ugly, or precise and vague, or tender and harsh. ”

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

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

“ Beware of hope, and beware of ambition! Each is excellently tonic, like German competition, in moderation, but all of you are suffering from self-indulgence in the first, and very many of you are ruining your constitutions with the second. ”

“ The full beauty of an activity is never brought out until it is subjected to discipline and strict ordering and nice balancing.
Three
The unfading charm of classical music is that you never tire of it.
Four
The spirit of literature is unifying; it joins the candle and the star, and by the magic of an image shows that the beauty of the greater is in the less.
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Five
If people, by merely wishing to do so, could regularly and seriously read, observe, write, and use every faculty and sense, there would be very little mental inefficiency. ”

“ If an editor knows not peace, he knows power. In Fleet Street, as in other streets, the population divides itself into those who want something and those who have something to bestow; those who are anxious to give a lunch, and those who deign occasionally to accept a lunch; those who have an axe to grind, and those who possess the grindstone. ”

“ In neither faith nor enthusiasm can a child compete with a convinced adult. No child could believe in anything as passionately as the modern millionaire believes in money, or as the modern social reformer believes in the virtue of Acts of Parliament. ”

“ We just simply enumerated books without end, praising or damning them, and arranged authors in neat pews, like cattle in classes at an agricultural show. No pastime is more agreeable to people who have the book disease, and none more quickly fleets the hours, and none is more delightfully futile. ”

“ Books not merely—and perhaps not chiefly—as vehicles of learning or knowledge, but books as books, books as entities, books as beautiful things, books as historical antiquities, books as repositories of memorable associations. ”

“ When homage is reiterated, when the pleasure of obeying a command and satisfying a caprice is begged for, when roses are strewn, and even necks put down in the path, one forgets to be humble; one forgets that in meekness alone lies the sole good ”

“ The woman must husband herself, dole herself out, economise herself so that she might be splendidly wasteful when need was. The woman must plan, scheme, devise, invent, reconnoitre, take precautions; and do all this sincerely and lovingly in the name and honour of love. A passion for her is a campaign ”

“ After all the shattering discoveries of science and conclusions of philosophy, mankind has still to live with dignity amid hostile nature, and in the presence of an unknowable power, and mankind can only succeed in this tremendous feat by the exercise of faith and of that mutual goodwill which is based in sincerity and charity.
Six
All the days that are to come will more or less resemble the present day, until you die.
Seven
In literature, when nine hundred and ninety-nine souls ignore you, but the thousandth buys your work, or at least borrows it—that is called enormous popularity. ”

“ Size is the quality which most strongly and surely appeals to the imagination of the multitude. Of all modern monuments the Eiffel Tower and the Big Wheel have aroused the most genuine curiosity and admiration: they are the biggest. ”

“ This is a matter of daily observation: that people are frantically engaged in attempting to get hold of things which, by universal experience, are hideously disappointing to those who have obtained possession of them. ”

“ 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 twenty-four hours, is the calm realisation of the extreme difficulty of the task, of the sacrifices and the endless effort it demands. ”

“ Publishers as a commercial class are neither more nor less honourable than any other commercial class, and authors are neither more nor less honourable than publishers. In the world of commerce one fights for one’s own hand and keeps within the law ”

“ Boys and ageing celibates are obsessed by the mysteriousness of woman. The obsession is a sign either of immaturity or of morbidity. The mysteriousness of woman,—take her, and see then if she is mysterious! ”

“ Nothing can be abhorrent, nothing blameworthy, nothing contrary to nature. Can we exceed nature? In the presence of the primeval and ever-continuing forces of nature, can we maintain our fantastic conceptions of sin and of justice? ”

“ No reading of books will take the place of a daily, candid, honest examination of what one has recently done, and what one is about to do—of a steady looking at one’s self in the face (disconcerting though the sight may be) . ”

“ Not only is art a factor in life; it is a factor in all lives. The division of the world into two classes, one of which has a monopoly of what is called “artistic feeling,” is arbitrary and false. Everyone is an artist, more or less; that is to say, there is no person quite without that faculty of poetising, which, by seeing beauty, creates beauty, and which, when it is sufficiently powerful and articulate, constitutes the musical composer, the architect, the imaginative writer, the sculptor, and the painter.
Six
Is it nothing to you to learn to understand that the world is not a dull place? ”

“ London is chiefly populated by greyhaired men who for twenty years have been about to become journalists and authors. And but for a fortunate incident—the thumb of my Fate has always been turned up—I might ere this have fallen back into that tragic rearguard of Irresolutes. ”

“ For me there is no supremacy in art. When fifty artists have contrived to be supreme, supremacy becomes impossible. Take a little song by Grieg. It is perfect, it is supreme. No one could be greater than Grieg was great when he wrote that song. ”

“ Can you see the sun over the viaduct at Loughborough Junction of a morning, and catch its rays in the Thames off Dewar’s whisky monument, and not shake with the joy of life? If so, you and Shakespeare are not yet in communication.
Twenty-four
Adults have never yet invented any institution, festival or diversion specially for the benefit of children. ”

“ In the cultivation of the mind one of the most important factors is precisely the feeling of strain, of difficulty, of a task which one part of you is anxious to achieve and another part of you is anxious to shirk. ”