Top 100 Matthew Arnold Quotes
#1. What shelter to grow ripe is ours? What leisure to grow wise?
Matthew Arnold
#3. 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.
Matthew Arnold
#4. Grey time-worn marbles Hold the pure Muses. In their cool gallery, By yellow Tiber, They still look fair.
Matthew Arnold
#5. The working-class is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman's heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes.
Matthew Arnold
#6. To thee only God granted A heart ever new: To all always open; To all always true.
Matthew Arnold
#7. Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.
Matthew Arnold
#8. Strew on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew! In quiet she reposes; Ah, would that I did too!
Matthew Arnold
#9. Resolve to be thyself; and know, that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
Matthew Arnold
#10. We are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I do not know.
Matthew Arnold
#12. The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness ; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience .
Matthew Arnold
#13. If an historian be an unbeliever in all heroism, if he be a man who brings every thing down to the level of a common mediocrity, depend upon it, the truth is not found in such a writer.
Matthew Arnold
#14. The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.
Matthew Arnold
#15. For this is the true strength of guilty kings, When they corrupt the souls of those they rule.
Matthew Arnold
#17. 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.
Matthew Arnold
#18. One thing only has been lent to youth and age in common
discontent.
Matthew Arnold
#19. Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.
Matthew Arnold
#20. The eloquent voice of our century uttered, shortly before leaving the world, a warning cry against the Anglo- Saxon contagion.
Matthew Arnold
#21. Whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all.
Matthew Arnold
#22. Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.
Matthew Arnold
#23. Nothing could moderate, in the bosom of the great English middle class, their passionate, absorbing, almost blood-thirsty clinging to life.
Matthew Arnold
#24. 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.
Matthew Arnold
#25. 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.
Matthew Arnold
#26. To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man.
Matthew Arnold
#27. Tis not to see the world
As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,
And heart profoundly stirred;
And weep, and feel the fullness of the past,
The years that are not more.
Matthew Arnold
#28. 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.
Matthew Arnold
#29. Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had In his high mountain cradle in Pamere, A foiled circuitous wanderertill at last The longed-for dash of waves is heard, and wide His luminous home of waters opens, bright And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea.
Matthew Arnold
#30. He will find one English book and one only, where, as in the "Iliad" itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible.
Matthew Arnold
#31. The strongest part of a religion today is its unconscious poetry
Matthew Arnold
#32. Joy comes and goes, hope ebbs and flows
Like the wave;
Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men.
Love tends life a little grace,
A few sad smiles; and then,
Both are laid in one cold place,
In the grave.
Matthew Arnold
#33. Like driftwood spares which meet and pass Upon the boundless ocean-plain, So on the sea of life, alas! Man nears man, meets, and leaves again.
Matthew Arnold
#34. Culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.
Matthew Arnold
#35. The brave, impetuous heart yields everywhere to the subtle, contriving head.
Matthew Arnold
#36. All pains the immortal spirit must endure,
All weakness that impairs, all griefs that bow,
Find their sole voice in that victorious brow.
Matthew Arnold
#37. Thought and science follow their own law of development; they are slowly elaborated in the growth and forward pressure of humanity, in what Shakespeare calls
... The prophetic soul,
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.
Matthew Arnold
#38. And see all sights from pole to pole, And glance, and nod, and hustle by; And never once possess our soul Before we die.
Matthew Arnold
#39. Life is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming.
Matthew Arnold
#40. This strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims.
Matthew Arnold
#41. 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.
Matthew Arnold
#42. Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
Matthew Arnold
#43. 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.
Matthew Arnold
#44. Force and right are the governors of this world; force till right is ready.
Matthew Arnold
#45. 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?
Matthew Arnold
#46. Man errs not that he deems His welfare his true aim, He errs because he dreams The world does but exist that welfare to bestow.
Matthew Arnold
#48. Good poetry does undoubtedly tend to form the soul and character; it tends to beget a love of beauty and of truth in alliance together, it suggests, however indirectly, high and noble principles of action, and it inspires the emotion so helpful in making principles operative.
Matthew Arnold
#49. Children of men! the unseen Power, whose eye Forever doth accompany mankind, Hath look'd on no religion scornfully That men did ever find.
Matthew Arnold
#50. To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.
Matthew Arnold
#51. Where great whales come sailing by, Sail and sail, with unshut eye, Round the world for ever and aye.
Matthew Arnold
#52. The world hath failed to impart the joy our youth forebodes; failed to fill up the void which in our breasts we bear.
Matthew Arnold
#53. Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread.
Matthew Arnold
#54. Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep, Where the winds are all asleep; Where the spent lights quiver and gleam; Where the salt weed sways in the stream.
Matthew Arnold
#55. Philistine must have originally meant, in the mind of those who invented the nickname, a strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the chosen people, of the children of the light.
Matthew Arnold
#56. 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?
Matthew Arnold
#57. Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.
Matthew Arnold
#58. And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty's heightening ...
Matthew Arnold
#59. The man who to untimely death is doomed Vainly would hedge him in from the assault of harm; He bears the seed of ruin in himself.
Matthew Arnold
#60. It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.
Matthew Arnold
#61. Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.
Matthew Arnold
#62. Cruel, but composed and bland,
Dumb, inscrutable and grand,
So Tiberius might have sat,
Had Tiberius been a cat.
Matthew Arnold
#63. The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
Matthew Arnold
#64. All knowledge is interesting to a wise man, and the knowledge of nature is interesting to all men.
Matthew Arnold
#65. The heart less bounding at emotion new, The hope, once crushed, less quick to spring again.
Matthew Arnold
#66. I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflexion, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in culture.
Matthew Arnold
#67. Life is the application of noble and profound ideas to life.
Matthew Arnold
#68. Come to me in my dreams, and then
By day I shall be well again.
For then the night will more than pay
The hopeless longing of the day.
Matthew Arnold
#69. Morality represents for everybody a thoroughly definite and ascertained idea: the idea of human conduct regulated in a certain manner.
Matthew Arnold
#70. And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Matthew Arnold
#72. They ... who await
No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.
Matthew Arnold
#73. The nice sense of measure is certainly not one of Nature's gifts to her English children ... we have all of us yielded to infatuation at some moment of our lives.
Matthew Arnold
#74. The sophist sneers: Fool, take Thy pleasure, right or wrong! The pious wail: Forsake A world these sophists throng! Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.
Matthew Arnold
#75. The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.
Matthew Arnold
#76. Everything in our political life tends to hide from us that there is anything wiser than our ordinary selves.
Matthew Arnold
#77. Protestantism has the method of Jesus with His secret too much left out of mind; Catholicism has His secret with His method too much left out of mind; neither has His unerring balance, His intuition, His sweet reasonableness. But both have hold of a great truth, and get from it a great power.
Matthew Arnold
#78. The sterner self of the Populace likes bawling, hustling, and smashing; the lighter self, beer.
Matthew Arnold
#80. 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.
Matthew Arnold
#81. Society may be imagined so uniform that one education shall be suitable for all its members; we have not a society of that kind, nor has any European country.
Matthew Arnold
#82. Nor bring, to see me cease to live,
Some doctor full of phrase and fame,
To shake his sapient head, and give
The ill he cannot cure a name.
Matthew Arnold
#83. Cutlure looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, - the passion for sweetness and light.
Matthew Arnold
#84. Calm soul of all things! make it mine To feel, amid the city's jar, That there abides a peace of thine, Man did not make, and cannot mar! The will to neither strive nor cry, The power to feel what others give! Calm, calm me more! nor let me die Before I have begun to live.
Matthew Arnold
#85. Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul.
Matthew Arnold
#86. There is no better motto which it [culture] can have than these words of Bishop Wilson, "To make reason and the will of God prevail."
Matthew Arnold
#87. Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.
Matthew Arnold
#88. That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.
Matthew Arnold
#89. The grand stye arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.
Matthew Arnold
#90. But so many books thou readest, But so many schemes thou breedest, But so many wishes feedest, That thy poor head almost turns.
Matthew Arnold
#91. The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.
Matthew Arnold
#92. All this I bear, for, what I seek, I know: Peace, peace is what I seek, and public calm: Endless extinction of unhappy hates.
Matthew Arnold
#93. 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.
Matthew Arnold
#94. Philistinism! - We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.
Matthew Arnold
#95. But thou, my son, study to make prevail One colour in thy life, the hue of truth.
Matthew Arnold
#96. 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!
Matthew Arnold
#97. 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.
Matthew Arnold
#98. The will is free; Strong is the soul, and wise, and beautiful; The seeds of godlike power are in us still; Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes, if we will!
Matthew Arnold
#99. 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.
Matthew Arnold
#100. Most men eddy about Here and there-eat and drink, Chatter and love and hate, Gather and squander, are raised Aloft, are hurled in the dust, Striving blindly, achieving Nothing; and then they die- Perish;-and no one asks Who or what they have been.
Matthew Arnold
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
