Matthew arnold quotes

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

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

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.

Men of culture are the true apostles of equality

Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good.

I keep saying, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, you are as obscure as life is.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.

Coldly, sadly descends The autumn evening. The Field Strewn with its dank yellow drifts Of wither'd leaves, and the elms, Fade into dimness apace, Silent; hardly a shout From a few boys late at their play!

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.

Philistinism! - We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.

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?

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

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

We cannot kindle when we will The fire which in the heart resides, The spirit bloweth and is still, In mystery our soul abides: But tasks in hours of insight will'd Can be through hours of gloom fulfill'd.

Force and right are the governors of this world; force till right is ready.

No, no! The energy of life may be Kept on after the grave, but not begun; And he who flagg'd not in the earthly strife, From strength to strength advancing--only he His soul well-knit, and all his battles won, Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.

Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.

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

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

Ah, love, let us be true To one another!

The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.

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

Genius is mainly an affair of energy.

A wanderer is man from his birth. He was born in a ship On the breast of the river of Time.

The interpretations of science do not give us this intimate sense of objects as the interpretations of poetry give it; they appeal to a limited faculty, and not to the whole man. It is not Linnaeus or Cavendish or Cuvier who gives us the true sense of animals, or water, or plants, who seizes their secret for us, who makes us participate in their life; it is Shakspeare [sic] … Wordsworth … Keats … Chateaubriand … Senancour.

All the live murmur of a summer's day.

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.

Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.

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.

Protestantism has the method of Jesus with His secret too much left out of mind; Catholicism has His secret with His method too much left out of mind; neither has His unerring balance, His intuition, His sweet reasonableness. But both have hold of a great truth, and get from it a great power.

Joy comes and goes, hope ebbs and flows Like the wave; Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men. Love tends life a little grace, A few sad smiles; and then, Both are laid in one cold place, In the grave.

The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.

Good poetry does undoubtedly tend to form the soul and character; it tends to beget a love of beauty and of truth in alliance together, it suggests, however indirectly, high and noble principles of action, and it inspires the emotion so helpful in making principles operative.

O born in days when wits were fresh and clear, And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames; Before this strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims, Its heads o'ertax'd, its palsied hearts, was rife.

Most men eddy about Here and there-eat and drink, Chatter and love and hate, Gather and squander, are raised Aloft, are hurled in the dust, Striving blindly, achieving Nothing; and then they die- Perish;-and no one asks Who or what they have been.

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

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

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

Below the surface stream, shallow and light, Of what we say and feel below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel, there flows With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed.

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

Art still has truth. Take refuge there.

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

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

At the present moment two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is.

Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.

All knowledge is interesting to a wise man, and the knowledge of nature is interesting to all men.

To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.

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

One thing only has been lent to youth and age in common--discontent.

Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.

The sea is calm tonight. The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits;- on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

The working-class is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman's heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes.

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.

Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voice; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it?

With aching hands and bleeding feet We dig and heap, lay stone on stone; We bear the burden and the heat Of the long day, and wish 'twere done. Not till the hours of light return All we have built do we discern.

If there ever comes a time when the women of the world come together purely and simply for the benefit of mankind, it will be a force such as the world has never known.

The same heart beats in every human breast.

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets, But often, in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life; A thirst to spend our fire and restless force In tracking out our true, original course; A longing to inquire Into the mystery of this heart which beats So wild, so deep in us—to know Whence our lives come and where they go.

It does not try to reach down to the level of inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or that sect of its own, with ready-made judgments and watchwords of its own. It seeks to away with classes, to make the best that has been taught and known in the world current everywhere, to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely--nourished, and not bound by them.

If one were searching for the best means to efface and kill in a whole nation the discipline of self-respect, the feeling for what is elevated, he could do no better than take the American newspapers.

Greatness is a spiritual condition.

Dreams dawn and fly: friends smile and die, Like spring flowers. Our vaunted life is one long funeral. Men dig graves, with bitter tears, For their dead hopes; and all, Mazed with doubts, and sick with fears, Count the hours.

For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.

Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active; but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man taken by himself.

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

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

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

Only--but this is rare-- When a beloved hand is laid in ours, When, jaded with the rush and glare Of the interminable hours, Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear, When our world-deafen'd ear Is by the tones of a loved voice caress'd-- A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast, And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again. The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain, And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know. A man becomes aware of his life's flow, And hears its winding murmur; and he sees The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.

And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know, Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure, Didst tread on earth unguess'd at. Better so! All pains the immortal spirit must endure, All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow, Find their sole speech in that victorious brow.

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.

God's Wisdom and God's Goodness!--Ah, but fools Mis-define thee, till God knows them no more. Wisdom and goodness they are God!--what schools Have yet so much as heard this simpler lore. This no Saint preaches, and this no Church rules: 'Tis in the desert, now and heretofore.

The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay ... More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.

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.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

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

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.

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

Yes! in the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone.

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

One must, I think, be struck more and more the longer one lives, to find how much in our present society a man's life of each day depends for its solidity and value upon whether he reads during that day, and far more still on what he reads during it.

And we forget because we must and not because we will.

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!

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

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.

Calm soul of all things! make it mine To feel, amid the city's jar, That there abides a peace of thine, Man did not make, and cannot mar! The will to neither strive nor cry, The power to feel what others give! Calm, calm me more! nor let me die Before I have begun to live.

The highest reach of science is, one may say, an inventive power, a faculty of divination, akin to the highest power exercised in poetry; therefore, a nation whose spirit is characterised by energy may well be eminent in science; and we have Newton. Shakspeare [sic] and Newton: in the intellectual sphere there can be no higher names. And what that energy, which is the life of genius, above everything demands and insists upon, is freedom; entire independence of all authority, prescription and routine, the fullest room to expand as it will.

Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.

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

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

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

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

Culture is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one

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

For this is the true strength of guilty kings, When they corrupt the souls of those they rule.

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

The need of expansion is as genuine an instinct in man as the need in a plant for the light, or the need in man himself for going upright. The love of liberty is simply the instinct in man for expansion.

Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men.

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

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.

Come, dear children, let us away; Down and away below!

Now, the whole world hears Or shall hear,--surely shall hear, at the last, Though men delay, and doubt, and faint, and fail,-- That promise faithful:--"Fear not, little flock! It is your Father's will and joy, to give To you, the Kingdom"!

What actions are the most excellent? Those, certainly, which most powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections: to those elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time. These feelings are permanent and the same; that which interests them is permanent and the same also.

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

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

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

France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.

Whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all.

Not deep the poet sees, but wide.

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

Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!

On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called History, a foam-bell more or less is no consequence.

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.

It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.

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

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

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.

Life is not having and getting, but being and becoming

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

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