Arnold Bennett

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.

And our excuse to ourselves is that there are only twenty-four hours in the day.

We are obliged, by various codes written and unwritten, to maintain ourselves and our families (if any) in health and comfort, to pay our debts, to save, to increase our prosperity by increasing our efficiency. A task sufficiently difficult! A task which very few of us achieve! A task often beyond our skill!

just as nothing succeeds like success, so nothing fails like failure

It is always the man who has tasted life who demands more of it.

but it is less disastrous to waste eight hours a day than sixteen hours a day; it is better to have lived a bit than never to have lived at all.

if your ordinary day's work is thus exhausting, then the balance of your life is wrong and must be adjusted

sleep is partly a matter of habit

Rise an hour, an hour and a half, or even two hours earlier; and—if you must—retire earlier when you can

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.