Matthew Arnold Quotes
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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.
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Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.
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Journalism is literature in a hurry.
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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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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.
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Where great whales come sailing by, Sail and sail, with unshut eye, Round the world for ever and aye? When did music come this way? Children dear, was it yesterday?
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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.
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Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul.
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If one were searching for the best means to efface and kill in a whole nation the discipline of self-respect, the feeling for what is elevated, he could do no better than take the American newspapers.
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How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves! Again - thou hearest? Eternal passion! Eternal pain!
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The men of culture are the true apostles of equality.
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The will is free; Strong is the soul, and wise, and beautiful; The seeds of god-like power are in us still; Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes, if we will!
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So, loath to suffer mute. We, peopling the void air, Make Gods to whom to impute The ills we ought to bear.
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The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
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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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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.
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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.
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Time may restore us in his course Goethe’s sage mind and Byron’s force; But where will Europe’s latter hour Again find Wordsworth’s healing power?
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Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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.