A sense of the value of time... is an essential preliminary to efficient work; it is the only method of avoiding hurry. — Arnold Bennett Copy Share Image
Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion. — Arnold Bennett Copy Share Image
The chances are that you have already come to believe that happiness is unattainable. But men have attained it. And they have attained it… — Arnold Bennett Copy Share Image
Good taste is better than bad taste, but bad taste is better than no taste. — Arnold Bennett Copy Share Image
To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking. — Arnold Bennett Copy Share Image
The parents exist to teach the child, but also they must learn what the child has to teach them; and the child has a… — Arnold Bennett Copy Share Image
The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labour is immense. — Arnold Bennett Copy Share Image
A man of sixty has spent twenty years in bed and over three years in eating. — Arnold Bennett Copy Share Image
“What then? Are we only to buy the books that we read? The question has merely to be thus bluntly put, and it answers… — Arnold Bennett Copy Share Image
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… — Arnold Bennett Copy Share Image
You are not in charge of the universe; you are in charge of yourself. — Arnold Bennett Copy Share Image
“When one has thoroughly got imbued into one's head the leading truth that nothing happens without a cause, one grows not only large-minded, but… — Arnold Bennett Copy Share Image
Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts. — Arnold Bennett Copy Share Image
“The public is a great actuality, like war. If you are a creative and creating artist, you cannot ignore it, though it can ignore… — Arnold Bennett Copy Share Image
![“What then? Are we only to buy the books that we read? The question has merely to be thus bluntly put, and it answers itself. All impassioned bookmen, except a few who devote their whole lives to reading, have rows of books on their shelves which they have never read, and which they never will read. I know that I have hundreds such. My eye rests on the works of Berkeley in three volumes, with a preface by the Right Honourable Arthur James Balfour. I cannot conceive the circumstances under which I shall ever read Berkeley; but I do not regret having bought him in a good edition, and I would buy him again if I had him not; for when I look at him some of his virtue passes into me; I am the better for him. A certain aroma of philosophy informs my soul, and I am less crude than I should otherwise be. This is not fancy, but fact. […..] "Taking Berkeley simply as an instance, I will utilise him a little further. I ought to have read Berkeley, you say; just as I ought to have read Spenser, Ben Jonson, George Eliot, Victor Hugo. Not at all. There is no ‘ought’ about it. If the mass of obtainable first-class literature were, as it was perhaps a century ago, not too large to be assimilated by a man of ordinary limited leisure _in_ his leisure and during the first half of his life, then possibly there might be an ‘ought’ about it. But the mass has grown unmanageable, even by those robust professional readers who can ‘grapple with whole libraries.’ And I am not a professional reader. I am a writer, just as I might be a hotel-keeper, a solicitor, a doctor, a grocer, or an earthenware manufacturer. I read in my scanty spare time, and I don’t read in all my spare time, either. I have other distractions. I read what I feel inclined to read, and I am conscious of no duty to finish a book that I don’t care to finish. I read in my leisure, not from a sense of duty, not to improve myself, but solely because it gives me pleasure to read. Sometimes it takes me a month to get through one book. I expect my case is quite an average case. But am I going to fetter my buying to my reading? Not exactly! I want to have lots of books on my shelves because I know they are good, because I know they would amuse me, because I like to look at them, and because one day I might have a caprice to read them. (Berkeley, even thy turn may come!) In short, I want them because I want them. And shall I be deterred from possessing them by the fear of some sequestered and singular person, some person who has read vastly but who doesn’t know the difference between a J.S. Muria cigar and an R.P. Muria, strolling in and bullying me with the dreadful query: ‘_Sir, do you read your books?_” quote by Arnold Bennett](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/770/arnold-bennett-3325_books_what-then-are-we-only-to-buy-the-books-t_123158.jpg)
