Matthew Arnold Quotes
-
Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.
-
With women the heart argues, not the mind.
-
Creep into thy narrow bed, Creep, and let no more be said!
-
Critical power...tends to make an intellectual situation of which the creative power can profitably avail itself. It tends to establish an order of ideas, if not absolutely true, yet true by comparison with that which it displaces; to make the best ideas prevail.
-
The men of culture are the true apostles of equality.
-
Charge once more, then, and be dumb! Let the victors, when they come, When the forts of folly fall, Find thy body by the wall.
-
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.
-
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.
-
There is the world of ideas and there is the world of practice; the French are often for suppressing the one and the English the other; but neither is to be suppressed.
-
What really dissatisfies in American civilisation is the want of the interesting, a want due chiefly to the want of those two great elements of the interesting, which are elevation and beauty.
-
I keep saying, Shakspeare, Shakspeare, you are as obscure as life is.
-
Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul.
-
Her cabin’d, ample Spirit, It flutter’d and fail’d for breath. To-night it doth inherit The vasty Hall of Death.
-
Wordsworth has gone from us - and ye, Ah, may ye feel his voice as we! He too upon a wintry clime Had fallen - on this iron time Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears.
-
Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good.
-
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.
-
It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.
-
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.
-
The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
-
Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born, With nowhere yet to rest my head, Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
-
Are ye too changed, ye hills? See, ’tis no foot of unfamiliar men Tonight from Oxford up your pathway strays! Here came I often, often, in old days; Thyrsis and I; we still had Thyrsis then.
-
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!
-
How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves! Again - thou hearest? Eternal passion! Eternal pain!
-
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.