Daily Inspiration Quote by Arnold Bennett

Bennett’s line has the plainspoken chill of a novelist who spent years watching people talk themselves into “progress” and then recoil from the bill. The sentence is built to puncture a comforting fantasy: that improvement arrives cleanly, like a new coat slipped on without pinching at the shoulders. By insisting that even “a change for the better” carries “drawbacks and discomforts,” he rejects the moral melodrama where good outcomes are proof of painless virtue. Better, in Bennett’s view, is not a reward; it’s a trade.

The intent is practical, almost managerial, but the subtext is psychological. People resist change less because they’re irrational than because they’re accurate accountants of loss. Any shift in routine costs something: status, familiarity, a sense of competence. The wording “always accompanied” makes it feel like a law of nature, not a pessimistic mood. And “discomforts” is a deliberately domestic word, pulling the idea down from politics or philosophy into the body: awkwardness, anxiety, the small humiliations of learning new rules.

Context matters: Bennett wrote in a Britain remade by late-Victorian and early modern life, where mobility, industry, and new social arrangements promised uplift while eroding older certainties. His fiction often tracks aspiration’s friction - the way self-improvement can look like self-betrayal. The line functions as both warning and reassurance: if it hurts, it doesn’t mean you chose wrong. It means you chose motion over stasis, and motion, even toward the light, scrapes.