Matthew Arnold
poet, writer, literary critic, university teacher, journalist, school inspector, essayist
Read on Wikipedia1822 – 1888
All Quotes by Matthew Arnold
“Ah, love, let us be true”
“I keep saying, Shakspeare, Shakspeare, you are as obscure as life is.”
“Who prop, thou ask'st in these bad days, my mind? And Tmolus hill, and Smyrna bay, though blind.”
“But be his Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.”
“Others abide our question. Thou art free. Out-topping knowledge.”
“And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know, Find their sole speech in that victorious brow.”
“Weary of myself, and sick of asking”
“The will is free; Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes, if we will!”
“Ennobling this dull pomp, the life of kings, By contemplation of diviner things.”
“We cannot kindle when we will Can be through hours of gloom fulfilled.”
“Calm soul of all things! make it mine Man did not make, and cannot mar.”
“Yes: in the sea of life enisl’d, We mortal millions live alone.”
“Journalism is literature in a hurry.”
“With aching hands and bleeding feet All we have built do we discern.”
“But often, in the world’s most crowded streets, Whence our lives come and where they go.”
“And long we try in vain to speak and act Is eloquent, is well — but ’tis not true!”
“Resolve to be thyself; and know, that he Who finds himself, loses his misery.”
“What shelter to grow ripe is ours? What leisure to grow wise?”
“Ah! two desires toss about And one to solitude.”
“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.”
“To thee only God granted To all always true.”
“Strew on her roses, roses, Ah! would that I did too.”
“Her cabin’d, ample Spirit, The vasty Hall of Death.”
“How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves! Eternal pain!”
“Truth sits upon the lips of dying men, And falsehood, while I lived, was far from mine.”
“I am past thirty, and three parts iced over.”
“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.”
“How fair a lot to fillIs left to each man still.”
“But each day brings its petty dust And not because we will.”
“Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.”
“Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.”
“This truth—to prove, and make thine own: ‘Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone.’”
“Peace, peace is what I seek and public calm, Endless extinction of unhappy hates.”
“With women the heart argues, not the mind.”
“Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active; but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man, taken by himself.”
“Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.”
“It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.”
“It is — last stage of all — Which blamed the living man.”
“Cruel, but composed and bland, Had Tiberius been a cat.”
“Style…is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it.”
“The Celts certainly have it in a wonderful measure.”
“The power of the Latin classic is in character, that of the Greek is in beauty. Now character is capable of being taught, learnt, and assimilated: beauty hardly.”
“Below the surface stream, shallow and light, The central stream of what we feel indeed.”
“Such a price To become what we sing.”
“At the present moment two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is.”
“The free-thinking of one age is the common sense of the next.”
“Choose equality.”
“Inequality has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.”
“For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.”
“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.”
“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.”
“That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.”
“What really dissatisfies in American civilisation is the want of the interesting, a want due chiefly to the want of those two great elements of the interesting, which are elevation and beauty.”
“If one were searching for the best means to efface and kill in a whole nation the discipline of self-respect, the feeling for what is elevated, he could do no better than take the American newspapers.”
“Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good.”
“The East bowed low before the blast, And plunged in thought again.”
“Come, dear children, let us away; This way, this way!”
“Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep, Where the winds are all asleep.”
“Where great whales come sailing by, Children dear, was it yesterday?”
“Singing, "Here came a mortal, The kings of the sea."”
“Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul.”
“The World in which we live and move Remorse, grief, joy.”
“Yet they, believe me, who await No gifts from Chance, have conquer’d Fate.”
“Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece, Long since, saw Byron’s struggle cease.”
“Physician of the Iron Age, And said — Thou ailest here, and here.”
“Wordsworth has gone from us — and ye, Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears.”
“Time may restore us in his course Again find Wordsworth’s healing power?”
“Hither and thither spins And never sees a whole.”
“The sophist sneers: Fool, take Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.”
“Thou hast no right to bliss.”
“We do not what we ought, That chance will bring us through.”
“Nature, with equal mind, The wind sweep man away.”
“So, loath to suffer mute. The ills we ought to bear.”
“Is it so small a thing To have advanc’d true friends, and beat down baffling foes?”
“The day in his hotness, The stars in their calm.”
“Thee at the ferry Oxford riders blithe, As the punt’s rope chops round.”
“Thou waitest for the spark from heaven! and we, Ah! do not we, wanderer! await it too?”
“And amongst us one, His seat upon the intellectual throne.”
“O born in days when wits were fresh and clear, Its heads o’ertax’d, its palsied hearts, was rife.”
“Still nursing the unconquerable hope, By night, the silver’d branches of the glade.”
“All are before me! I behold What dost thou in this living tomb?”
“Wandering between two worlds, one dead, Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.”
“Oh, hide me in your gloom profound, Not chafed by hourly false control!”
“The translator of Homer should above all be penetrated by a sense of four qualities of his author: — that he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally, that he is eminently noble.”
“Of these two literatures, as of the intellect of Europe in general, the main effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort; the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge — theology, philosophy, history, art, science — to see the object as in itself it really is.”
“The grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.”
“For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.”
“Burke is so great because, almost alone in England, he brings thought to bear upon politics, he saturates politics with thought.”
“The notion of the free play of the mind upon all subjects being a pleasure in itself, being an object of desire, being an essential provider of elements without which a nation's spirit, whatever compensations it may have for them, must, in the long run, die of inanition, hardly enters into an Englishman's thoughts.”
“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.”
“On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called History, a foam-bell more or less is no consequence.”
“Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive and wisely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance.”
“The great apostle of the Philistines, Lord Macaulay”
“Are ye too changed, ye hills? Thyrsis and I; we still had Thyrsis then.”
“And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.”
“He went; his piping took a troubled sound He could not wait their passing, he is dead!”
“The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I.”
“Hear it, O Thyrsis, still our tree is there!— Within a folding of the Apennine.”
“Why faintest thou! I wander’d till I died. Our Scholar travels yet the loved hillside.”
“The sea is calm tonight. Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!”
“Only, from the long line of spray”
“The sea of faith And naked shingles of the world.”
“Ah, love, let us be true Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
“Creep into thy narrow bed, Creep, and let no more be said!”
“Let the long contention cease! Geese are swans, and swans are geese.”
“Charge once more, then, and be dumb! Find thy body by the wall.”
“Coldly, sadly descends From a few boys late at their play!”
“O strong soul, by what shore Surely, has not been left vain!”
“Therefore to thee it was given Bringing thy sheep in thy hand.”
“But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,”
“Radiant with ardour divine! Weariness not on your brow.”
“Because without order there can be no society, and without society there can be no human perfection.”
“Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace; and America is just ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.”
“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.”
“I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflexion, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in culture.”
“Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.”
“Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest, and admiration.”
“The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light. He who works for sweetness and light, works to make reason and the will of God prevail. He who works for machinery, he who works for hatred, works only for confusion. Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.”
“The men of culture are the true apostles of equality.”
“Everything in our political life tends to hide from us that there is anything wiser than our ordinary selves.”
“Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.”
“The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience.”
“Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.”
“And as long as the world lasts, all who want to make progress in righteousness will come to Israel for inspiration, as to the people who have had the sense for righteousness most glowing and strongest; and in hearing and reading the words Israel has uttered for us, carers for conduct will find a glow and a force they could find nowhere else.”
“The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.”
“Coleridge, poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.”
“A beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.”
“The crown of literature is poetry.”
“However, if I shall live to be eighty I shall probably be the only person left in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific publications.”
“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.”