A. C. BENSON

Knowing what you can not do is more important than knowing what you can do. In fact, that's good taste.

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

All the best stories are but one story in reality - the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Very often a change of self is needed more than a change of scene.

As I make my slow pilgrimage through the world, a certain sense of beautiful mystery seems to gather and grow.

Man, an animal that makes bargains.

I am sure it is one's duty as a teacher to try to show boys that no opinions, no tastes, no emotions are worth much unless they are one's own. I suffered acutely as a boy from the lack of being shown this.

A well begun is half ended.

One's mind has a way of making itself up in the background, and it suddenly becomes clear what one means to do.

People seldom refuse help, if one offers it in the right way.

The worst sorrows in life are not in its losses and misfortunes, but its fears.

When you get to my age life seems little more than one long march to and from the lavatory.

Ambition often puts Men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same position with creeping.

Readjusting is a painful process, but most of us need it at one time or another.

It seems sometimes as if one were powerless to do any more from within to overcome troubles, and that help must come from without.

The test of a good letter is a very simple one. If one seems to hear the other person talking as one reads, it is a good letter.

Do you know the times when one seems to stick fast in circumstances like the fly in the jam-pot? It can't be helped, and I suppose the best thing to do is to lay in a good store of jam!

I expect that all of us get pretty much what we deserve of appreciation.

Congenial labor is the secret of happiness.

I never enter a new company without the hope that I may discover a friend, perhaps the friend, sitting there with an expectant smile. That hope survives a thousand disappointments.

What a strange power the perception of beauty is! It seems to ebb and flow like some secret tide, independent alike of health and disease, of joy or sorrow. There are times in our lives when we seem to go singing on our way, and when the beauty of the world sets itself like a quiet harmony to the song we uplift.

People who deal with life generously and large-heartedly go on multiplying relationships to the end.

The moment that any life, however good, stifles you, you may be sure it isn't your real life.

Congenial labor is essence of happiness.

There remain times when one can only endure. One lives on, one doesn't die, and the only thing that one can do, is to fill one's mind and time as far as possible with the concerns of other people. It doesn't bring immediate peace, but it brings the dawn nearer.