Matthew Arnold Quotes
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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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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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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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Thou hast no right to bliss.
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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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Creep into thy narrow bed, Creep, and let no more be said!
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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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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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Why faintest thou! I wander’d till I died. Roam on! The light we sought is shining still. Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill, Our Scholar travels yet the loved hillside.
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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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Cruel, but composed and bland, Dumb, inscrutable and grand, So Tiberius might have sat, Had Tiberius been a cat.
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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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Journalism is literature in a hurry.
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Sanity - that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power.
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All are before me! I behold The House, the Brotherhood austere! - And what am I, that I am here? For rigorous teachers seized my youth, And purged its faith, and trimm'd its fire, Show'd me the high, white star of Truth, There bade me gaze, and there aspire. Even now their whispers pierce the gloom: What dost thou in this living tomb?
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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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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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We do not what we ought, What we ought not, we do, And lean upon the thought That chance will bring us through.
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The World in which we live and move Outlasts aversion, outlasts love: Outlasts each effort, interest, hope, Remorse, grief, joy.
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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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To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.
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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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Only, from the long line of spray