Matthew Arnold Quotes
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He went; his piping took a troubled sound Of storms that rage outside our happy ground; He could not wait their passing, he is dead!
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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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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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Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.
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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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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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Such a price The Gods exact for song; To become what we sing.
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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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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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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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Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
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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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The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience.
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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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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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The day in his hotness, The strife with the palm; The night in her silence, The stars in their calm.
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Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.
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The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.
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Yet they, believe me, who await No gifts from Chance, have conquer’d Fate.
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Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.
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France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.