Arnold Bennett Quotes

Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness.

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

We learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.

Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.

I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.

Empathy is the faculty to resonate with the feelings of others. When we meet someone who is joyful, we smile. When we witness someone in pain, we suffer in resonance with his or her suffering.

I forgave the DAR many years ago. You lose a lot of time hating people.

I've been on the end of losing a fight, and there's a piece of my heart that has compassion towards that because I know how it feels.

Grief, and an estate, is joy understood.

I've learned that intelligence alone doesn't mean a damn thing. It only leads to violence and pain.

I think we've all been kind of... everyone's been hurt, everyone's felt loss, everyone has exultation, everyone has a need to be loved, or to have lost love, so when you play a character, you're pulling out those little threads and turning them up a bit.

Anyone who has experienced a certain amount of loss in their life has empathy for those who have experienced loss.

Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest, the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.

Growing up in Westboro, there was a culture of celebrating death and tragedy... a very calloused way of seeing other people's pain. After I left, it took me a while to be able to really empathize with what it must have been like for the loved ones of people whose funerals we protested.

My heart goes out to anyone who suffers, and of course, to their families.

'Citylights' is for those people who know a lot but don't feel at all. It's time for them to feel, and this film will make those people, who know so much, feel because feeling is the life blood of human race, which is disappearing.

No one suffers so much as he [the genius] with the people, and, therefore, for the people, with whom he lives. For, in a certain sense, it is certainly only "by suffering" that a man knows. If compassion is not itself clear, abstractly conceivable or visibly symbolic knowledge, it is, at any rate, the strongest impulse for the acquisition of knowledge. It is only by suffering that the genius understands men. And the genius suffers most because he suffers with and in each and all; but he suffers most through his understanding. . . .

The man who has not suffered - what does he know anyway?

It is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought.

Maybe it didn’t seem like a big deal to you Zach. But now, I hope you understand. My world was collapsing. I needed those notes. I needed any hope those notes might have offered. And you? You took that hope away. You decided I didn’t deserve to have it.

How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?

The wisdom that comes from having experienced heartbreak cannot be bequeathed; it can only be gained through experience. And having truly felt it, we are far more likely to have compassion for others. Anything that takes us close to true compassion takes us closer to what will one day be an experience of even greater joy.

I'll picture Rat Kiley face, his grief, and I'll think, You dumb cooze. Because she wasn't listening. It wasn't a war story. It was a love story.