Daily Inspiration Quote by Arnold Bennett

A cause isn’t sold here as virtue; it’s marketed as taste. Bennett’s genius move is to frame political or moral commitment in the language of luxury consumer goods: champagne and high heels, objects designed to delight and to punish. The simile is funny because it’s a little outrageous, but it’s also barbed. He’s puncturing the pious fantasy that the “right side of history” will feel ergonomically correct. No: it pinches, it gives you a headache, it ruins the next morning. That’s the point.

The subtext is a critique of comfort as a moral standard. “Inconvenient” is almost too mild; he’s really talking about the friction between conviction and daily life, the social cost of being difficult at dinner parties, the private cost of losing opportunities, relationships, ease. By choosing champagne and high heels, he signals a specific class and gender theater: refined people routinely accept discomfort for status, beauty, and pleasure, then act surprised when ethics demands the same. Bennett turns that hypocrisy into a challenge.

Context matters. Bennett wrote in an era when “causes” were proliferating in public life - suffrage, labor politics, reform movements - and when the modern idea of identity-through-commitment was taking shape. His line reads like an inoculation against fashionable activism and fashionable apathy at once. If you want magnificence, don’t pretend it comes without blisters. The suffering isn’t accidental; it’s the admission price.