Matthew Arnold quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold Famous Quotes & Sayings

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But thou, my son, study to make prevail One colour in thy life, the hue of truth.

Miracles are doomed; they will drop out like fairies and witchcraft, from ...

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

Without poetry our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.

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

Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul.

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

The strongest part of a religion today is its unconscious poetry

Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men.

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

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.

History - a vast Mississippi of falsehoods

Waiting from heaven for the spark to fall.

All the live murmur of a summer's day.

O strong soul, by what shore Tarriest thou now? For that force, Surely, has not been left vain!

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

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

The brave, impetuous heart yields everywhere to the subtle, contriving head.

How many minds
almost all the great ones
were formed in secrecy and solitude!

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

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

Art still has truth. Take refuge there.

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

Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge.

Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.

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

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

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?

The free thinking of one age is the common sense of the next.

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

The eternal not ourselves that makes for righteousness.

Hither and thither spins The wind-borne mirroring soul, A thousand glimpses wins, And never sees a whole.

Choose equality.

And we forget because we must

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

But there remains the question: what righteousness really is. The method and secret and sweet reasonableness of Jesus.

Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?

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

And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty's heightening ...

The kings of modern thought are dumb.

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."

Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.

Ah! two desires toss about The poet's feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.

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.

Nothing could moderate, in the bosom of the great English middle class, their passionate, absorbing, almost blood-thirsty clinging to life.

Cutlure looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, - the passion for sweetness and light.

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.

Everything in our political life tends to hide from us that there is anything wiser than our ordinary selves.

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

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

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.

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.

Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.

Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends; Nature and man can never be fast friends. Fool, if thou canst not pass her, rest her slave!

He spoke, and loos'd our heart in tears. He laid us as we lay at birth On the cool flowery lap of earth.

Not a having and a resting, but a growing and becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.

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

I do not believe today everything I believed yesterday I wonder will I believe tomorrow everything I believe today.

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

Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.

Saw life steadily and saw it whole.

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

Life is the application of noble and profound ideas to life.

Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.

Culture is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one

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

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

I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflexion, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in culture.

Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well.

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

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

The world hath failed to impart the joy our youth forebodes; failed to fill up the void which in our breasts we bear.

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

Life is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming.

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

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age, More fortunate, alas! than we, Which without hardness will be sage, And gay without frivolity.

Time, so complain'd of, Who to no one man Shows partiality, Brings round to all men Some undimm'd hours.

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

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

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

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.

Morality represents for everybody a thoroughly definite and ascertained idea: the idea of human conduct regulated in a certain manner.

We are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I do not know.

Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece, Long since, saw Byron 's struggle cease.

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.

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

To thee only God granted A heart ever new: To all always open; To all always true.

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.

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!

Life is not having and getting, but being and becoming

Coleridge: poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.

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.

The heart less bounding at emotion new, The hope, once crushed, less quick to spring again.

Once read thy own breast right, And thou hast done with fears.

Now the great winds shoreward blow Now the salt tides seaward flow Now the wild white horses play Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.

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.

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.

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.

To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man.