Top 100 Quotes About Matthew Arnold
#1. When Abraham Lincoln was murdered The one thing that interested Matthew Arnold Was that the assassin shouted in Latin As he lept on the stage This convinced Matthew There was still hope for America.
Christopher Morley
#2. TEN GREATEST ENGLISH POETS Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning. TEN GREATEST ENGLISH ESSAYISTS Bacon, Addison, Steele, Macaulay, Lamb, Jeffrey, De Quincey, Carlyle, Thackeray and Matthew Arnold.
Joseph Devlin
#3. If ever there comes a time when the women of the world come together purely and simply for the benefit of mankind, it will be a force such as the world has never known. MATTHEW ARNOLD, NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH POET AND PHILOSOPHER
Lisa Bevere
#4. The reason why Matthew Arnold, to my feeling, fails entirely as a poet (though no doubt his ideas were good - at least, I am told they were) is that he had no sense of touch whatsoever. Nothing made any impression on his skin. He could feel neither the shape nor the texture of a poem with his hands.
Edith Sitwell
#5. All serious art, music, literature is a critical act. It is so, firstly, in the sense of Matthew Arnold's phrase: "a criticism of life." Be it realistic, fantastic, Utopian or satiric, the construct of the artist is a counter-statement to the world.
George Steiner
#6. I believed that 'freedom' is not a clear or sufficient answer to the question of what conservatives believe in. Like Matthew Arnold, I held that 'freedom is a very good horse to ride, but to ride somewhere'.
Roger Scruton
#7. What shelter to grow ripe is ours? What leisure to grow wise?
Matthew Arnold
#11. The "hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and, pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits," this good fellow carried hidden in his nature, apparently, something destined to develop into a necessity for humane letters.
Matthew Arnold
#12. Nature's great law, and the law of all men's minds? To its own impulse every creature stirs: Live by thy light, and Earth will live by hers.
Matthew Arnold
#14. 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
#15. For eager teachers seized my youth, pruned my faith and trimmed my fire. Showed me the high, white star of truth, there bade me gaze and there aspire.
Matthew Arnold
#16. Grey time-worn marbles Hold the pure Muses. In their cool gallery, By yellow Tiber, They still look fair.
Matthew Arnold
#17. 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
#18. To thee only God granted A heart ever new: To all always open; To all always true.
Matthew Arnold
#19. Come, dear children, let us away; Down and away below!
Matthew Arnold
#20. Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.
Matthew Arnold
#21. Nature herself seems, I say, to take the pen out of his hand, and to write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power.
Matthew Arnold
#22. Strew on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew! In quiet she reposes; Ah, would that I did too!
Matthew Arnold
#23. Coleridge: poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.
Matthew Arnold
#24. Resolve to be thyself; and know, that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
Matthew Arnold
#25. Let the long contention cease! / Geese are swans, and swans are geese.
Matthew Arnold
#26. 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.
Matthew Arnold
#27. We are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I do not know.
Matthew Arnold
#28. But there remains the question: what righteousness really is. The method and secret and sweet reasonableness of Jesus.
Matthew Arnold
#29. Miracles are doomed; they will drop out like fairies and witchcraft, from ...
Matthew Arnold
#30. Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born.
Matthew Arnold
#31. Ah love, let us be true to one another, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams; so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy nor love nor life.
Matthew Arnold
#33. Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
Matthew Arnold
#34. The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness ; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience .
Matthew Arnold
#35. 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
#36. The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.
Matthew Arnold
#37. A wanderer is man from his birth. He was born in a ship On the breast of the river of Time.
Matthew Arnold
#38. If there ever comes a time when the women of the world come together purely and simply for the benefit of mankind, it will be a force such as the world has never known.
Matthew Arnold
#39. 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.
Matthew Arnold
#40. For this is the true strength of guilty kings, When they corrupt the souls of those they rule.
Matthew Arnold
#41. And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well
but 'tis not true!
Matthew Arnold
#42. Without poetry our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.
Matthew Arnold
#43. Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?
Matthew Arnold
#44. Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.
Matthew Arnold
#45. It is not in the outward and visible world of material life that the Celtic genius of Wales or Ireland can at this day hope to count for much; it is in the inward world of thought and science.What it has been, what is has done, what it will be or will do, as a matter of modern politics.
Matthew Arnold
#46. For what wears out the life of mortal men? 'Tis that from change to change their being rolls; Tis that repeated shocks, again, again, Exhaust the energy of strongest souls And numb the elastic powers.
Matthew Arnold
#48. Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good.
Matthew Arnold
#49. He spoke, and loos'd our heart in tears. He laid us as we lay at birth On the cool flowery lap of earth.
Matthew Arnold
#50. 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
#51. One thing only has been lent to youth and age in common
discontent.
Matthew Arnold
#52. Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.
Matthew Arnold
#53. Hither and thither spins The wind-borne mirroring soul, A thousand glimpses wins, And never sees a whole.
Matthew Arnold
#54. The eloquent voice of our century uttered, shortly before leaving the world, a warning cry against the Anglo- Saxon contagion.
Matthew Arnold
#55. 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
#56. 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.
Matthew Arnold
#57. Youth dreams a bliss on this side of death. It dreams a rest, if not more deep, More grateful than this marble sleep; It hears a voice within it tell: Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well. 'Tis all perhaps which man acquires, But 'tis not what our youth desires.
Matthew Arnold
#58. We cannot kindle when we will The fire which in the heart resides, The spirit bloweth and is still, In mystery our soul abides: But tasks in hours of insight will'd Can be through hours of gloom fulfill'd.
Matthew Arnold
#59. Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.
Matthew Arnold
#60. Nothing could moderate, in the bosom of the great English middle class, their passionate, absorbing, almost blood-thirsty clinging to life.
Matthew Arnold
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man.
Matthew Arnold
#64. Time, so complain'd of, Who to no one man Shows partiality, Brings round to all men Some undimm'd hours.
Matthew Arnold
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. O strong soul, by what shore Tarriest thou now? For that force, Surely, has not been left vain!
Matthew Arnold
#69. Genius is mainly an affair of energy, and poetry is mainly an affair of genius; therefore a nation whose spirit is characterized by energy may well be imminent in poetry - and we have Shakespeare.
Matthew Arnold
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. The strongest part of a religion today is its unconscious poetry
Matthew Arnold
#73. 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.
Matthew Arnold
#74. Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go? Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on, Soon will the musk carnations break and swell.
Matthew Arnold
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. Unquiet souls. In the dark fermentation of earth, in the never idle workshop of nature, in the eternal movement, yea shall find yourselves again.
Matthew Arnold
#78. To the Bible men will return; and why? Because they cannot do without it.
Matthew Arnold
#79. 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
#81. The brave, impetuous heart yields everywhere to the subtle, contriving head.
Matthew Arnold
#82. When Byron's eyes were shut in death, We bow'd our head and held our breath. He taught us little; but our soul Had felt his like a thunder roll ... We watch'd the fount of fiery life Which serv'd for that Titanic life.
Matthew Arnold
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. Ah! two desires toss about The poet's feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.
Matthew Arnold
#87. Life is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming.
Matthew Arnold
#88. This strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims.
Matthew Arnold
#89. Thou waitest for the spark from heaven! and we, Light half-believers in our casual deeds ... Who hesitate and falter life away, And lose tomorrow the ground won today- Ah, do not we, Wanderer, await it too?
Matthew Arnold
#91. No, no! The energy of life may be Kept on after the grave, but not begun; And he who flagg'd not in the earthly strife, From strength to strength advancing
only he His soul well-knit, and all his battles won, Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.
Matthew Arnold
#92. The need of expansion is as genuine an instinct in man as the need in a plant for the light, or the need in man himself for going upright. The love of liberty is simply the instinct in man for expansion.
Matthew Arnold
#93. Dreams dawn and fly: friends smile and die, Like spring flowers. Our vaunted life is one long funeral. Men dig graves, with bitter tears, For their dead hopes; and all, Mazed with doubts, and sick with fears, Count the hours.
Matthew Arnold
#94. 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
#95. Truth illuminates and gives joy; and it is by the bond of joy, not of pleasure, that men's spirits are indissolubly held.
Matthew Arnold
#96. Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
Matthew Arnold
#97. 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.
Matthew Arnold
#99. 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
#100. God's Wisdom and God's Goodness!
Ah, but fools Mis-define thee, till God knows them no more. Wisdom and goodness they are God!
what schools Have yet so much as heard this simpler lore. This no Saint preaches, and this no Church rules: 'Tis in the desert, now and heretofore.
Matthew Arnold
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