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 BennettRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Happiness is achievable through reason and aligning one's actions with principles, not just seeking pleasure.
This quote emphasizes the idea that many people mistakenly believe that happiness is out of reach. However, Arnold Bennett asserts that true happiness can be achieved by cultivating reason and aligning one's behavior with good principles, rather than merely seeking fleeting pleasures, whether physical or mental. It suggests that the path to happiness is more about personal growth and moral integrity than about external gratification.
Themes
HappinessReasonPrinciplesConductPersonal Growth
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote in a self-help seminar to discuss the nature of true happiness.
More from Arnold Bennett
All quotes →Literature exists so that where one man has lived finely ten thousand may afterward live finely
Arnold BennettRead
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 BennettRead
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. No one can take it from you. It is unstealable. And no one receives either more or less than you receive.
Arnold BennettRead
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;_x000D_ 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 BennettRead
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; in its right, authentic colors; without making comparisons. Cherish and burnish this faculty of seeing crudely, simply, artlessly, ignorantly; of seeing like a baby or a lunatic, who lives each moment by itself and tarnishes by the present no remembrance of the past.
Arnold BennettRead
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I was happy, I knew that. While experiencing happiness, we have difficulty in being conscious of it. Only when the happiness is past and we look back on it do we suddenly realize - sometimes with astonishment - how happy we had been.
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Christmas is here, Merry old Christmas, Gift-bearing Christmas, Day of grand memories, King of the year!
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Joy is the sweet voice, joy the luminous cloud. We in ourselves rejoice! And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, all melodies the echoes of that voice, all colours a suffusion from that light.
Samuel Taylor ColeridgeRead