Matthew Arnold Quotes

ForTime, not Corydon, hath conquered thee.

Cruel, but composed and bland, Dumb, inscrutable and grand, So Tiberius might have sat, Had Tiberius been a cat.

The strongest part of a religion today is its unconscious poetry

We do not what we ought; What we ought not, we do; And lean upon the thought That chance will bring us through; But our own acts, for good or ill, are mightier powers.

All this I bear, for, what I seek, I know: Peace, peace is what I seek, and public calm: Endless extinction of unhappy hates.

Mind is a light which the Gods mock us with, To lead those false who trust it.

But so many books thou readest, But so many schemes thou breedest, But so many wishes feedest, That thy poor head almost turns.

The kings of modern thought are dumb.

For eager teachers seized my youth, pruned my faith and trimmed my fire. Showed me the high, white star of truth, there bade me gaze and there aspire.

We, peopling the void air, Make Gods to whom to impute The ills we ought to bear; With God and Fate to rail at, suffering easily.

For science, God is simply the stream of tendency by which all things seek to fulfill the law of their being.

Nature's great law, and the law of all men's minds? To its own impulse every creature stirs: Live by thy light, and Earth will live by hers.

That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.

Sanity -- that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power.

English civilization the humanizing, the bringing into one harmonious and truly humane life, of the whole body of English society that is what interests me.

What shelter to grow ripe is ours? What leisure to grow wise?

Ah love, let us be true to one another, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams; so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy nor love nor life.

And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know, / Self-schooled, self-scanned, self-honoured, self-secure / Didst tread on earth unguessed at. Better so!.

If Paris that brief flight allow, My humble tomb explore! It bears: Eternity, be thou My refuge! and no more.

Grey time-worn marbles Hold the pure Muses. In their cool gallery, By yellow Tiber, They still look fair.

Creep into thy narrow bed, Creep, and let no more be said!

Come to me in my dreams, and thenBy day I shall be well again!For so the night will more than payThe hopeless longings of the day.

Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread.

Alas, is even Love too weak to unlock the heart and let it speak? Are even lovers powerless to reveal To one another what indeed they feel?

Waiting from heaven for the spark to fall.

I need coffee to deal with this, and I’m not getting decaf.

It is so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done.

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

Is it so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun to have lived light in the spring to have loved to have thought to have done?

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

They who await no gifts from chance have conquered fate.

We forget because we must And not because we will.

Nature with equal mind sees all her sons at play sees man control the wind the wind sweep man away.

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

Resolve to be thyself ... he who finds himself loses his misery!

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

The pursuit of the perfect then is the pursuit of sweetness and light.

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

Who hesitate and falter life away and lose tomorrow the ground won today.

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