Matthew Arnold Quotes
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Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.
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It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.
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Her cabin’d, ample Spirit, It flutter’d and fail’d for breath. To-night it doth inherit The vasty Hall of Death.
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With women the heart argues, not the mind.
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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.
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A beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.
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But be his My special thanks, whose even-balanced soul, From first youth tested up to extreme old age, Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.
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How fair a lot to fillIs left to each man still.
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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.
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Radiant with ardour divine! Beacons of Hope ye appear! Languor is not in your heart, Weakness is not in your word, Weariness not on your brow.
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Philistine must have originally meant, in the mind of those who invented the nickname, a strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the children of the light.
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Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece, Long since, saw Byron’s struggle cease.
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Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul.
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That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.
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The East bowed low before the blast, In patient deep disdain; She let the legions thunder past, And plunged in thought again.
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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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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. Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
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And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.
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How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves! Again - thou hearest? Eternal passion! Eternal pain!
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Physician of the Iron Age, Goethe has done his pilgrimage. He took the suffering human race, He read each wound, each weakness clear - And struck his finger on the place, And said - Thou ailest here, and here.
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Sad Patience, too near neighbour to despair.
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Oh, hide me in your gloom profound, Ye solemn seats of holy pain! Take me, cowl'd forms, and fence me round, Till I possess my soul again; Till free my thoughts before me roll, Not chafed by hourly false control!
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Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.
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I keep saying, Shakspeare, Shakspeare, you are as obscure as life is.