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
Literature exists so that where one man has lived finely ten thousand may afterward live finely
Interpretation
What this quote means
Literature allows individuals to experience and learn from the lives of others, enriching their own existence.
This quote suggests that the power of literature transcends time and individual experience. When one person writes artfully about their life, it provides lessons and inspiration for countless others. Literature creates a shared human experience, enabling readers to learn from the triumphs and struggles of others, thereby enriching their own lives and encouraging them to live with greater intention and beauty.
Themes
LiteratureExperienceInspirationLearningHuman Experience
In practice
Example use cases
In a book club discussion about the impact of literature on personal growth.
More from Arnold Bennett
All quotes βThe 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 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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Reduced... to a crude formula, the Russian tragedy is precisely the tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the prerogative of the minority.
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