Matthew Arnold Quotes
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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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What shelter to grow ripe is ours? What leisure to grow wise?
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Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.
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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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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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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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Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
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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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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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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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Such a price The Gods exact for song; To become what we sing.
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Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.
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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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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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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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Singing, 'Here came a mortal, But faithless was she: And alone dwell for ever The kings of the sea.'
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The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience.
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And as long as the world lasts, all who want to make progress in righteousness will come to Israel for inspiration, as to the people who have had the sense for righteousness most glowing and strongest; and in hearing and reading the words Israel has uttered for us, carers for conduct will find a glow and a force they could find nowhere else.
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Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.
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The day in his hotness, The strife with the palm; The night in her silence, The stars in their calm.
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The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.
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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.
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France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.