Matthew Arnold Quotes

Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.

If there ever comes a time when the women of the world come together purely and simply for the benefit of mankind, it will be a force such as the world has never known.

Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.

The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.

Like driftwood spares which meet and pass Upon the boundless ocean-plain, So on the sea of life, alas! Man nears man, meets, and leaves again.

Philistine must have originally meant, in the mind of those who invented the nickname, a strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the chosen people, of the children of the light.

He will find one English book and one only, where, as in the "Iliad" itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible.

Strew on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew! In quiet she reposes; Ah, would that I did too!

Life is not having and getting, but being and becoming

Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.

Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.

Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.

Yes! in the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone.

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.

This strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims.

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.

The bent of our time is towards science, towards knowing things as they are.

Where great whales come sailing by, Sail and sail, with unshut eye, Round the world for ever and aye.

For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go? Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on, Soon will the musk carnations break and swell.

Unquiet souls. In the dark fermentation of earth, in the never idle workshop of nature, in the eternal movement, yea shall find yourselves again.

Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!

Genius is mainly an affair of energy.

Let the long contention cease! / Geese are swans, and swans are geese.

There is no better motto which it [culture] can have than these words of Bishop Wilson, "To make reason and the will of God prevail."

All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science.

The grand stye arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.

Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born.

The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness ; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience .

And see all sights from pole to pole, And glance, and nod, and hustle by; And never once possess our soul Before we die.

The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.

Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.

Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men.

Art still has truth. Take refuge there.

Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.

Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.

Man errs not that he deems His welfare his true aim, He errs because he dreams The world does but exist that welfare to bestow.

For this is the true strength of guilty kings, When they corrupt the souls of those they rule.

Culture is the passion for sweetness and light, and (what is more) the passion for making them prevail.

Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.

They... who await. No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.

And we forget because we must and not because we will.

What is it to grow old? Is it to lose the glory of the form, The lustre of the eye? Is it for Beauty to forego her wreath? Yes; but not this alone.

Children of men! the unseen Power, whose eye Forever doth accompany mankind, Hath look'd on no religion scornfully That men did ever find.

Greatness is a spiritual condition.

One thing only has been lent to youth and age in common--discontent.

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.

Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.