Daily Inspiration Quote by Arnold Bennett

Bennett’s line lands like a shrug in a stiff collar: measured, mildly amused, and quietly rattled. “My deliberate opinion” is the tell. He’s not claiming revelation or genius; he’s staging thoughtfulness itself, the Victorian-Edwardian habit of sounding reasonable even when the conclusion is essentially, What on earth is going on? The dash does the dramatic work, a little pause where propriety wobbles and candor slips through.

Calling the world “jolly strange” is a tonal tightrope. “Jolly” is cheerful varnish, the kind of social lubricant Bennett’s middle-class characters would recognize; “strange” is the hairline crack underneath. Put together, they signal a speaker trained to keep dread or disorientation within polite limits. It’s not optimism, exactly. It’s the English talent for understatement as self-defense: if you can label chaos as merely “jolly strange,” you can live with it, even profit from it, without admitting how destabilizing modern life feels.

Context matters because Bennett wrote at a hinge moment: industrial modernity, shifting class power, the churn of new money and new manners. His fiction often watches ordinary people trying to narrate their lives into coherence while the social script keeps changing. The sentence performs that struggle in miniature. “Deliberate” gestures toward rational control; the payoff is a comic anti-payoff, the admission that rationality doesn’t quite take. Bennett isn’t offering a philosophy. He’s capturing a posture: civilized bafflement, delivered with a smile tight enough to hold.