The Arnold Bennett Calendar

A person’s character is, and can be, nothing else but the total result of his habits of thought.

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.

As a matter of fact, people “indulge” in remorse; it is a somewhat vicious form of spiritual pleasure.

When a thing is thoroughly well done it often has the air of being a miracle.

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.

All the days that are to come will more or less resemble the present day, until you die.

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.

If life is not a continual denial of the past, then it is nothing.

The profoundest belief of the average man is that virtue ought never to be its own reward. Shake that belief and you commit a cardinal sin; you disturb his mental quietude.

It is notorious that the smaller the community, and the more completely it is self-contained, the deeper will be its preoccupation with its own trifling affairs.

To my mind, most societies with a moral aim are merely clumsy machines for doing simple jobs with the maximum of friction, expense and inefficiency. I should define the majority of these societies as a group of persons each of whom expects the others to do something very wonderful.

There is nothing like a sleepless couch for a clear vision of one’s environment.

The supreme muddlers of living are often people of quite remarkable intellectual faculty, with a quite remarkable gift of being wise for others.

Our leading advertisers have richly proved that the public will believe anything if they are told of it often enough.

Here’s a secret. No writer likes writing, at least not one in a hundred, and the exception, ten to one, is a howling mediocrity. That’s a fact. But all the same, they’re miserable if they don’t write.

The first and noblest aim of imaginative literature is not either to tickle or to stab the sensibilities, but to render a coherent view of life’s apparent incoherence, to give shape to the amorphous, to discover beauty which was hidden, to reveal essential truth.

There is a theory that a great public can appreciate a great novel, that the highest modern expression of literary art need not appeal in vain to the average reader. And I believe this to be true—provided that such a novel is written with intent, and with a full knowledge of the peculiar conditions to be satisfied; I believe that a novel could be written which would unite in a mild ecstasy of praise the two extremes—the most inclusive majority and the most exclusive minority.

“Give us more brains, Lord!” ejaculated a great writer. Personally, I think he would have been wiser if he had asked first for the power to keep in order such brains as we have.

Under the incentive of a woman’s eyes, of what tremendous efforts is a clever man not capable, and, deprived of it, to what depths of stagnation will he not descend!

Elegance is a form of beauty. It not only enhances beauty, but it is the one thing which will console the eye for the absence of beauty.

There are several ways of entering upon journalism. One is at once to found or purchase a paper, and thus achieve the editorial chair at a single step. This course is often adopted in novels, sometimes with the happiest results; and much less often in real life, where the end is invariably and inevitably painful.

Existence rightly considered is a fair compromise between two instincts—the instinct of hoping one day to live, and the instinct to live here and now.

Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission.

The average man is not half enough of an egotist. If egotism means a terrific interest in one’s self, egotism is absolutely essential to efficient living.

Events have no significance except by virtue of the ideas from which they spring; the clash of events is the clash of ideas, and out of this clash the moral lesson inevitably emerges, whether we ask for it or no. Hence every great book is a great moral book, and there is a true and fine sense in which the average reader is justified in regarding art as the handmaid of morality.

Shakespeare is “taught” in schools; that is to say, the Board of Education and all authorities pedagogic bind themselves together in a determined effort to make every boy in the land a lifelong enemy of Shakespeare. It is a mercy they don’t “teach” Blake.

There are those who assert that Spencer was not a supreme genius! At any rate he taught me intellectual courage; he taught me that nothing is sacred that will not bear inspection; and I adore his memory.

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.

The average reader (like Goethe and Ste. Beuve) has his worse and his better self, and there are times when he will yield to the former; but on the whole his impulses are good. In every writer who earns his respect and enduring love there is some central righteousness, which is capable of being traced and explained, and at which it is impossible to sneer.

Literature is the art of using words. This is not a platitude, but a truth of the first importance, a truth so profound that many writers never get down to it, and so subtle that many other writers who think they see it never in fact really comprehend it. The business of the author is with words. The practisers of other arts, such as music and painting, deal with ideas and emotions, but only the author has to deal with them by means of words. Words are his exclusive possession among creative artists and craftsmen. They are his raw material, his tools and instruments, his manufactured product, his alpha and omega. He may abound in ideas and emotions of the finest kind, but those ideas and emotions cannot be said to have an effective existence until they are expressed; they are limited to the extent of their expression; and their expression is limited to the extent of the author’s skill in the use of words. I smile when I hear people say, “If I could write, if I could only put down what I feel—!” Such people beg the whole question. The ability to write is the sole thing peculiar to literature—not the ability to think nor the ability to feel, but the ability to write, to utilise words.