I will defy you to account to me on the spur of the moment for the other eight hours.
Source: How to Live on 24 Hours a Day
Author
English · 1867-1931 · 18 quotes
English · 1867–1931
18 quotes in our collection
Arnold Bennett was the English novelist and journalist who, at the turn of the twentieth century, documented the lives of ordinary people in the Potteries district of Staffordshire with a thoroughness that made the Five Towns internationally famous. Born in Hanley in 1867, he left the Midlands for London at twenty-one, educated himself through systematic reading, and became one of the most productive writers of his era — novels, plays, criticism, journalism, and a celebrated series of books on the practical management of time. The Old Wives' Tale and the Clayhanger trilogy are his major achievements. His notebooks on time — The Human Machine, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day — gave ordinary readers a practical philosophy before the genre had a name. A man of sixty has spent twenty years in bed: the arithmetic of time that Bennett made his subject.
Collected Quotes
I will defy you to account to me on the spur of the moment for the other eight hours.
Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission.
You can control nothing but your own mind.
In case of friction, the machine is always at fault.
And when I say "the human machine" I mean the brain and the body—and chiefly the brain.
The idea of devoting to them thirty or forty consecutive minutes of wonderful solitude is to me repugnant.
I cannot possibly allow you to scatter priceless pearls of time with such Oriental lavishness.
No newspaper reading in trains!
He has a solid coin of time to spend every day—call it a sovereign.
So let us begin to examine the budget of the day's time.
You can only waste the passing moment.
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.
We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is.
You have to live on this twenty-four hours of daily time.
The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it.
Philosophers have explained space. They have not explained time.