Life & Mortality Quote by Arnold Bennett

Bennett smuggles a democratic claim into what looks like a compliment to genius: the artist gets an advantage, but it is an advantage of timing, not bloodline. The key word is "sometimes". Inspiration isn’t a royal entitlement; it’s a rare kind of attention that visits, flares, and disappears. By framing insight as "sudden" and "transient", he deflates the romantic myth of the artist as a permanent seer while still defending art as a distinct mode of knowing.

The line pivots on a brilliantly Victorian contrast: "dead fact" versus "living truth". Facts live in the "brain" as inert inventory; truth happens when the "soul" takes possession, when information becomes felt meaning. Bennett isn’t anti-intellectual so much as suspicious of mere accumulation. He’s describing the moment when a statistic becomes a story, when observation turns into recognition. That is the secret engine of the novel: taking the ordinary and re-animating it until it feels inevitable.

Context matters. Writing in an era intoxicated by new "facts" - industry, social science, progress narratives - Bennett carves out space for the inner life without rejecting modernity. He offers art as a corrective to a culture that can measure everything and still miss the point.

The last sentence is the sting. "At moments we are all artists" isn’t a Hallmark uplift; it’s a challenge. If insight is available to anyone, then the failure to see isn’t a lack of talent but a lapse of perception. Art becomes less a profession than a heightened interval of being awake.