How to Live on 24 Hours a Day Quotes

“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, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“Which of us is not saying to himself--which of us has not been saying to himself all his life: "I shall alter that when I have a little more time"? We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is.”
― Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“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, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions.”
― Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“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, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“without the power to concentrate that
is to say, without the power to dictate to the brain its task and to ensure obedience true life is impossible. Mind control is the first element of a full existence.”
― Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is.”
― Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“If you imagine that you will be able to achieve your ideal by ingeniously planning out a timetable with a pen on a piece of paper, you had better give up hope at once.If you are not prepared for discouragements and disillusions;
if you will not be content with a small result for a big effort, then do not begin. Lie down again and resume the uneasy doze which you call your existence.”
― Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“Beware of undertaking too much at the start. Be content with quite a little. Allow for accidents. Allow for human nature, especially your own.”
― Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“I will never cease advising my friends and enemies to read poetry before anything.”
― Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“the chief beauty about the constant supply of 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 unspoilt, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your career.”
― Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“The man who begins to go to bed forty minutes before he opens his bedroom door is bored; that is to say, he is not living.”
― Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“And since nothing whatever happens to us outside our own brain; since nothing hurt us or gives us pleasure except within the brain, the supreme importance of being able to control what goes on in that mysterious brain is patent.”
― Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose.”
― Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“Imaginative poetry produces a far greater mental strain than novels. It produces probably the severest strain of any form of literature. It is the highest form of literature. It yields the highest form of pleasure, and teaches the highest form of wisdom. In a word, there is nothing to compare with it. I say this with sad consciousness of the fact that the majority of people do not read poetry.”
― Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“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.”
― Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“The most important of all perceptions is the continual perception of cause and effect—in other words, the perception of the continuous development of the universe—in still other words, the perception of the course of evolution. When one has thoroughly got imbued into one's head the leading truth that nothing happens without a cause, one grows not only large-minded, but large-hearted. It is hard to have one's watch stolen, but one reflects that the thief of the watch became a thief from causes of heredity and environment which are as interesting as they are scientifically comprehensible; and one buys another watch, if not with joy, at any rate with a philosophy that makes bitterness impossible. One loses, in the study of cause and effect, that absurd air which so many people have of being always shocked and pained by the curiousness of life. Such people live amid human nature as if human nature were a foreign country full of awful foreign customs. But, having reached maturity, one ought surely to be ashamed of being a stranger in a strange land!”
― Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste to-morrow; it is kept for you.”
― Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“Most people who are ruined are ruined by attempting too much.”
― Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“You probably think of the orchestra as a heterogeneous mass of instruments
producing a confused agreeable mass
of sound. You do not listen for details because you have never trained your ears to listen to details.”
― Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“And without the power to concentrate—that is to say, without the power to dictate to the brain its task and to ensure obedience—true life is impossible. Mind control is the first element of a full existence.”
― Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“It is always the man who has tasted life who demands more of it.”
― Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“We shall never have more time. We have, and always had, all the time there is.”
― Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“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 twenty-four hours is the calm realisation of the extreme difficulty of the task, of the sacrifices and the endless effort which it demands. I cannot too strongly insist on this.”
― Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“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, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“Man, know thyself. I say it out loud. The phrase is one of those phrases with which everyone is familiar, of which everyone acknowledges the value, and which only the most sagacious put into practice. I don't know why.”
― Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“Can you deny that when you have something definite to look forward to on eventide, something that is to employ all of your energy - the thought of this something gives a glow and a more intense vitality to the whole day?”
― Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“A good novel rushes you forward like a
skiff down a stream, and you arrive at the end, perhaps breathless, but
unexhausted.”
― Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“One may have spent one's time badly, but one did spend it; one did do something with it, however ill-advised that something may have been. To do something else means a change of habits.”
― Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

“A failure or so, in itself, would not matter, if it did not incur a loss of self-esteem and of self-confidence. But just as nothing succeeds like success, so nothing fails like failure. Most people who are ruined are ruined by attempting too much. Therefore, in setting out on the immense enterprise of living fully and comfortably within the narrow limits of twenty-four hours a day, let us avoid at any cost the risk of an early failure. I will not agree that, in this business at any rate, a glorious failure is better than a petty success. I am all for the petty success. A glorious failure leads to nothing; a petty success may lead to a success that is not petty.”
― Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day