Matthew Quotes

Is it so small a thing To have enjoyed the sun.

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!

The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I.

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.

Religion is ethics heightened, enkindled, lit up by feeling

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.

To the Bible men will return; and why? Because they cannot do without 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.

The eternal not ourselves that makes for righteousness.

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men, And falsehood, while I lived, was far from mine.

Saw life steadily and saw it whole.

The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.

Six years-six little years-six drops of time.

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!

It's very easy for me to laugh at myself and laugh at life.

Married relationships are not what we are pretending they are. It is not the '40s or the 50s anymore - we cannot pretend, things are changing.

L.A. is not a town that supports a lot of theater. Most of the shows don't get through a week or two and then, the audience kind of disappears.

I played a lot of character parts in school.

If you pitch your movie to someone and they say, "Oh, please, don't make that. No one would see it." Do it! Because that means you may have something that's not the norm.

Create your own path. Cultivate it. It'll take time. It doesn't happen overnight. I was an actor for many years before I got behind the camera.