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.

Arnold Bennett

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

Arnold Bennett

attitude positive happiness

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

Arnold Bennett

moving-on life-changing change

The best cure for worry, depression, melancholy, brooding, is to go deliberately forth and try to lift with one's sympathy the gloom of somebody else.

Arnold Bennett

inspirational-life worry depression

Concentrate on something useful. Having decided to achieve a task, achieve it at all costs.

Arnold Bennett

cost procrastination tasks

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

Arnold Bennett

success inspirational life

The chief beauty about time is that you cannot waste it in advance. The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoiled, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your life. You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose.

Arnold Bennett

new-year motivational lying

Every scene, even the commonest, is wonderful, if only one can detach oneself, casting off all memory of use and custom and behold it, as it were, for the first time.

Arnold Bennett

casting-off use memories

The real Tragedy is the tragedy of the man who never in his life braces himself for his one supreme effort-he never stretches to his full capacity, never stands up to his full stature.

Arnold Bennett

effort real men

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

Arnold Bennett

wise may tea

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.

Arnold Bennett

learning soul knowledge

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.

Arnold Bennett

happy happiness life

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.

Arnold Bennett

cutting reading book

A first-rate organizer is never in a hurry. He is never late. He always keeps up his sleeve a margin for the unexpected.

Arnold Bennett

planning unexpected firsts

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

Arnold Bennett

procrastination time next-week

A true friend is one who likes you despite your achievements.

Arnold Bennett

true-friend achievement likes

Time is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible, without it nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it.

Arnold Bennett

affair raw-materials miracle

Good taste is better than bad taste, but bad taste is better than no taste.

Arnold Bennett

good-taste taste character

Falsehood often lurks upon the tongue of him, who, by self-praise, seeks to enhance his value in the eyes of others.

Arnold Bennett

tongue eye self

A cause may be inconvenient, but it's magnificent. It's like champagne or high heels, and one must be prepared to suffer for it.

Arnold Bennett

high-heels suffering funny

The saxophone is the embodied spirit of beer.

Arnold Bennett

saxophone spirit beer