Matthew Arnold Quotes
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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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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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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.
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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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To thee only God granted A heart ever new: To all always open; To all always true.
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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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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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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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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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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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Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul.
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How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves! Again - thou hearest? Eternal passion! Eternal pain!
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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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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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The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
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How fair a lot to fillIs left to each man still.
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That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.
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And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.
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Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.
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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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Thou hast no right to bliss.
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Sad Patience, too near neighbour to despair.