Matthew Arnold Quotes
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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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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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The men of culture are the true apostles of equality.
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Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul.
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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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Journalism is literature in a hurry.
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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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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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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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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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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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How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves! Again - thou hearest? Eternal passion! Eternal pain!
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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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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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Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece, Long since, saw Byron’s struggle cease.
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Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.
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The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
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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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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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Thou hast no right to bliss.
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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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Creep into thy narrow bed, Creep, and let no more be said!