Matthew Arnold Quotes
-
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?
-
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!
-
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!
-
Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece, Long since, saw Byron’s struggle cease.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.
-
A beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.
-
Hither and thither spins The wind-borne mirroring soul, A thousand glimpses wins, And never sees a whole.
-
How fair a lot to fillIs left to each man still.
-
And amongst us one, Who most has suffer’d, takes dejectedly His seat upon the intellectual throne.
-
Below the surface stream, shallow and light, Of what we say and feel - below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel, there flows With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed.
-
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.
-
And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.
-
Sad Patience, too near neighbour to despair.
-
Cruel, but composed and bland, Dumb, inscrutable and grand, So Tiberius might have sat, Had Tiberius been a cat.
-
The grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.
-
The World in which we live and move Outlasts aversion, outlasts love: Outlasts each effort, interest, hope, Remorse, grief, joy.
-
The East bowed low before the blast, In patient deep disdain; She let the legions thunder past, And plunged in thought again.
-
Coleridge, poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.
-
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.