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The test of a first-rate work, and a test of your sincerity in calling it a first-rate work, is that you finish it.

Arnold Bennett

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Arnold Bennett
Age: 63 †
Born: 1867
Born: May 27
Died: 1931
Died: March 27
Autobiographer
Diarist
Film Writer
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Mother Town
Enoch Arnold Bennett
Firsts
First
Work
Sincerity
Finish
Test
Tests
Rate
Calling

More quotes by Arnold Bennett

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The chances are that you have already come to believe that happiness is unattainable. But men have attained it. And they have attained it by realizing that happiness does not spring from the procuring of physical or mental pleasure, but from the development of reason and the adjustment of conduct to principles.
Arnold Bennett
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It is difficult to make a reputation, but is even more difficult seriously to mar a reputation once properly made --- so faithful is the public.
Arnold Bennett
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Literature exists so that where one man has lived finely ten thousand may afterward live finely
Arnold Bennett
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Time is the explicable raw material of everything.
Arnold Bennett
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Great wealth may be to its owner a blessing or a curse. Alas! I fear it is too often the latter. It hardens the heart, blunts the finer susceptibilities, and transforms into a fiend what under more favourable circumstances might have been a human being.
Arnold Bennett
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Mother is far too clever to understand anything she does not like.
Arnold Bennett
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The war years count double. Things and people not actively in use age twice as fast.
Arnold Bennett
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The parents exist to teach the child, but also they must learn what the child has to teach them and the child has a very great deal to teach them
Arnold Bennett
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Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism.
Arnold Bennett
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No mind, however loving, could bear to see plainly into all the recess of another mind.
Arnold Bennett
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Good taste is better than bad taste, but bad taste is better than no taste.
Arnold Bennett
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Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission.
Arnold Bennett
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The pleasure of doing a thing in the same way at the same time every day, and savoring it, should be noted.
Arnold Bennett
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Only a very gifted mind could cope singly with all the problems which present themselves in the perfecting of a home.
Arnold Bennett
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Saw Washington Monument. Phallic. Appalling. A national catastrophe.
Arnold Bennett
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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
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Because her instinct has told her, or because she has been reliably informed, the faded virgin knows that the supreme joys are not for her she knows by a process of the intellect but she can feel her deprivation no more than the young mother can feel the hardship of the virgin's lot.
Arnold Bennett
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At moments we are all artists.
Arnold Bennett
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One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change - not rest, except in sleep.
Arnold Bennett
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I will never cease advising my friends and enemies to read poetry before anything.
Arnold Bennett