A biography for Arnold Bennetthasn’t been written yet.
“Ardour in well-doing is a misleading and a treacherous thing. It cries out loudly for employment; you can't satisfy it at first; it wants more and more; it is eager to move mountains and divert the course of rivers. It isn't content till it perspires. And then, too often, when it feels the perspiration on its brow, it wearies all of a sudden and dies, without even putting itself to the trouble of saying, "I've had enough of this.”
“You probably think of the orchestra as a heterogeneous mass of instrumentsproducing a confused agreeable massof sound. You do not listen for details because you have never trained your ears to listen to details.”
“The moment you're born you're done for.”
“The price of justice is eternal publicity.”
“It is easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is from the top.”
“Of all the inhabitants of the inferno, none but Lucifer knows that hell is hell, and the secret function of purgatory is to make of heaven an effective reality.”
“Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.”
“Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.”