Quotes by Arnold Bennett

“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.”

“We talked books. We just simply enumerated books without end, praising or damning them, and arranged authors in neat pews.... 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.”

“I was a bookman; I had always been a bookman. From adolescence books had been one of my passions. 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. Questions of type, ink, paper, margins, watermarks, paginations, bindings, were capable of really agitating me. I was too sensitive and catholic a lover a books to be a scholar in the strict modern meaning of the term. My magnum opus was not a work of scholarship, and even such scholarship as it comprised had been attained by a labor hateful to me. I would inhale the scholarship of others as a sweet smell. I would gather it like honey, but eclectically, never exhausting one flower before trying the next. My knowledge was, perhaps, considerable, but it was unorganized. And my principal claim to consideration was that I could wander in any demesne of culture without having the awkward air of a stranger. In brief, I was comprehensively bookish.”

“By love I mean a noble and sensuous passion, absorbing the energies of the soul, fulfilling destiny, and reducing all that has gone before it to the level of a mere prelude.”

“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.”