Matthew Arnold Quotes
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Strew on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew. In quiet she reposes: Ah! would that I did too.
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Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.
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Yes: in the sea of life enisl’d, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone.
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The notion of the free play of the mind upon all subjects being a pleasure in itself, being an object of desire, being an essential provider of elements without which a nation's spirit, whatever compensations it may have for them, must, in the long run, die of inanition, hardly enters into an Englishman's thoughts.
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We, in some unknown Power's employ, Move on a rigorous line; Can neither, when we will, enjoy, Nor, when we will, resign.
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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.
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Not a having and a resting, but a growing and becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.
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Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
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Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.
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It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.
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Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.
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Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.
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Singing, 'Here came a mortal, But faithless was she: And alone dwell for ever The kings of the sea.'
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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.
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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.
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To thee only God granted A heart ever new: To all always open; To all always true.
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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.
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Ah! two desires toss about The poet's feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.
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Still nursing the unconquerable hope, Still clutching the inviolable shade, With a free, onward impulse brushing through, By night, the silver’d branches of the glade.
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To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.
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I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflexion, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in culture.
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Such a price The Gods exact for song; To become what we sing.
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Inequality has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.
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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.