Matthew Arnold Quotes
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Thou hast no right to bliss.
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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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The sea of faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.
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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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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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Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece, Long since, saw Byron’s struggle cease.
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Oh, hide me in your gloom profound, Ye solemn seats of holy pain! Take me, cowl'd forms, and fence me round, Till I possess my soul again; Till free my thoughts before me roll, Not chafed by hourly false control!
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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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How fair a lot to fillIs left to each man still.
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One must, I think, be struck more and more the longer one lives, to find how much in our present society a man's life of each day depends for its solidity and value upon whether he reads during that day, and far more still on what he reads during it.
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And amongst us one, Who most has suffer’d, takes dejectedly His seat upon the intellectual throne.
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What actions are the most excellent? Those, certainly, which most powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections: to those elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time. These feelings are permanent and the same; that which interests them is permanent and the same also.
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Hither and thither spins The wind-borne mirroring soul, A thousand glimpses wins, And never sees a whole.
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Cruel, but composed and bland, Dumb, inscrutable and grand, So Tiberius might have sat, Had Tiberius been a cat.
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Sad Patience, too near neighbour to despair.
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And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.
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That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.
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The grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.
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A beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.
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Eutrapelia. 'A happy and gracious flexibility,' Pericles calls this quality of the Athenians...lucidity of thought, clearness and propriety of language, freedom from prejudice and freedom from stiffness, openness of mind, amiability of manners.
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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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Coleridge, poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.
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Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.
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Physician of the Iron Age, Goethe has done his pilgrimage. He took the suffering human race, He read each wound, each weakness clear - And struck his finger on the place, And said - Thou ailest here, and here.