Matthew Arnold Quotes

Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.

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.

Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.

The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.

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.

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.

Strew on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew! In quiet she reposes; Ah, would that I did too!

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.

Life is not having and getting, but being and becoming

Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.

Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.

Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.

Yes! in the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone.

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.

This strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims.

The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay ... More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.

The bent of our time is towards science, towards knowing things as they are.

Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets, But often, in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life; A thirst to spend our fire and restless force In tracking out our true, original course; A longing to inquire Into the mystery of this heart which beats So wild, so deep in us—to know Whence our lives come and where they go.

Where great whales come sailing by, Sail and sail, with unshut eye, Round the world for ever and aye.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age, More fortunate, alas! than we, Which without hardness will be sage, And gay without frivolity.

Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go? Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on, Soon will the musk carnations break and swell.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

Unquiet souls. In the dark fermentation of earth, in the never idle workshop of nature, in the eternal movement, yea shall find yourselves again.

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!

Genius is mainly an affair of energy.

Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!

Now the great winds shoreward blow Now the salt tides seaward flow Now the wild white horses play Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.

Let the long contention cease! / Geese are swans, and swans are geese.

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."

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.

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.

The grand stye arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.

Beautiful city! . . . spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age . . . her ineffable charm. . . . Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic!

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.

The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost ideas with Hebraism is conduct and obedience.Nothing can do away with this ineffaceable difference. The Greek quarrel with the body and its desires is, that they hinder right thinking; the Hebrew quarrel with them is, that they hinder right acting.

All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science.

Art still has truth. Take refuge there.

The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.

The same heart beats in every human breast.

Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.

Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born.

The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness ; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience .

Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men.