Matthew Arnold Quotes
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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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The men of culture are the true apostles of equality.
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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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Journalism is literature in a hurry.
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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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With women the heart argues, not the mind.
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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.
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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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Creep into thy narrow bed, Creep, and let no more be said!
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Coldly, sadly descends The autumn evening. The Field Strewn with its dank yellow drifts Of wither’d leaves, and the elms, Fade into dimness apace, Silent;-hardly a shout From a few boys late at their play!
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Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul.
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English civilization - the humanizing, the bringing into one harmonious and truly humane life, of the whole body of English society - that is what interests me.
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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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How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves! Again - thou hearest? Eternal passion! Eternal pain!
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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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Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good.
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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.
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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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I keep saying, Shakspeare, Shakspeare, you are as obscure as life is.
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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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The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
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Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.
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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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Thou hast no right to bliss.