Matthew Arnold Quotes
However, if I shall live to be eighty I shall probably be the only person left in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific publications.
Is it so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the sky, to have loved, to have thought, to have done?
The power of the Latin classic is in character , that of the Greek is in beauty . Now character is capable of being taught, learnt, and assimilated: beauty hardly.
Time, so complain'd of, Who to no one man Shows partiality, Brings round to all men Some undimm'd hours.
Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.
Philistinism! - We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.
All knowledge is interesting to a wise man, and the knowledge of nature is interesting to all men.
Tis not to see the world As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes, And heart profoundly stirred; And weep, and feel the fullness of the past, The years that are not more.
I knew the mass of men conceal'd Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd They would by other men be met With blank indifference.
Ah! two desires toss about The poet's feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.
Style ... is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it.
Time may restore us in his course Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force: But where will Europe's latter hour Again find Wordsworth's healing power?
Everything in our political life tends to hide from us that there is anything wiser than our ordinary selves.
Inequality has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.
I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflexion, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in culture.
And amongst us one, Who most has suffer'd, takes dejectedly His seat upon the intellectual throne.
Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep, Where the winds are all asleep; Where the spent lights quiver and gleam; Where the salt weed sways in the stream.
O strong soul, by what shore Tarriest thou now? For that force, Surely, has not been left vain!
Hither and thither spins The wind-borne mirroring soul, A thousand glimpses wins, And never sees a whole.
What really dissatisfies in American civilisation is the want of the interesting, a want due chiefly to the want of those two great elements of the interesting, which are elevation and beauty.
The heart less bounding at emotion new, The hope, once crushed, less quick to spring again.
Come to me in my dreams, and then By day I shall be well again. For then the night will more than pay The hopeless longing of the day.
Morality represents for everybody a thoroughly definite and ascertained idea: the idea of human conduct regulated in a certain manner.
All pains the immortal spirit must endure, All weakness that impairs, all griefs that bow, Find their sole voice in that victorious brow.
And each day brings it's pretty dust, Our soon-choked souls to fll And we forget because we must, And not because we will.
The discipline of the Old Testament may be summed up as a discipline teaching us to abhor and flee from sin; the discipline of the New Testament, as a discipline teaching us to die to it.
Truth illuminates and gives joy; and it is by the bond of joy, not of pleasure, that men's spirits are indissolubly held.
The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.... He who works for sweetness and light united, works to make reason and the will of God prevail.
Truth sits upon the lips of dying men, And falsehood, while I lived, was far from mine.
The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.
