Matthew Arnold Quotes
It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.
It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.
Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.
Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge.
And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty's heightening.
Nor bring, to see me cease to live, Some doctor full of phrase and fame, To shake his sapient head, and give The ill he cannot cure a name.
The sophist sneers: Fool, take Thy pleasure, right or wrong! The pious wail: Forsake A world these sophists throng! Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.
It is - last stage of all When we are frozen up within, and quite The phantom of ourselves To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man
Genius is mainly an affair of energy, and poetry is mainly an affair of genius; therefore a nation whose spirit is characterized by energy may well be imminent in poetry - and we have Shakespeare.
Nothing could moderate, in the bosom of the great English middle class, their passionate, absorbing, almost blood-thirsty clinging to life.
Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.
Spare me the whispering, crowded room, the friends who come and gape and go, the ceremonious air of gloom - all, which makes death a hideous show.
Nature herself seems, I say, to take the pen out of his hand, and to write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power.
Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.
One has often wondered whether upon the whole earth there is anything so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is really going, as an ordinary young Englishman of our upper class.
I am bound by my own definition of criticism : a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.
The will is free; Strong is the soul, and wise, and beautiful; The seeds of godlike power are in us still; Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes, if we will!
The eloquent voice of our century uttered, shortly before leaving the world, a warning cry against the "Anglo- Saxon contagion.
He spoke, and loos'd our heart in tears. He laid us as we lay at birth On the cool flowery lap of earth.
Without poetry our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.
To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.
Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest, and admiration.
Weep bitterly over the dead, for he is worthy, and then comfort thyself; drive heaviness away: thou shall not do him good, but hurt thyself.
Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.
Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good.
Culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.
If an historian be an unbeliever in all heroism, if he be a man who brings every thing down to the level of a common mediocrity, depend upon it, the truth is not found in such a writer.
But there remains the question: what righteousness really is. The method and secret and sweet reasonableness of Jesus.
Weary of myself, and sick of asking What I am, and what I ought to be, At this vessel's prow I stand, which bears me Forwards, forwards, o'er the starlit sea.
The nice sense of measure is certainly not one of Nature's gifts to her English children ... we have all of us yielded to infatuation at some moment of our lives.
I do not believe today everything I believed yesterday I wonder will I believe tomorrow everything I believe today.
And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well -- but 'tis not true!