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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
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
THE THOUGHTS that rain their steady glow Like stars on life's cold sea, Which others know, or say they know - They never shone for me. Thoughts light, like gleams, my spirit's sky, 5 But they will not remain. They light me once, they hurry by, And never come again. -- Matthew Arnold
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
To the Bible men will return; and why? Because they cannot do without it. -- Matthew Arnold
Saw life steadily and saw it whole. -- Matthew Arnold
Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away. -- Matthew Arnold
In our English popular religion the common conception of a future state of bliss is that of ... a kind of perfected middle-class home, with labour ended, the table spread, goodness all around, the lost ones restored, hymnody incessant. -- Matthew Arnold
Alas, is even Love too weak to unlock the heart and let it speak? Are even lovers powerless to reveal To one another what indeed they feel? -- Matthew Arnold
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
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
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
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. -- Matthew Arnold
Art still has truth. Take refuge there. -- Matthew Arnold
What shelter to grow ripe is ours? What leisure to grow wise? -- Matthew Arnold
Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties! -- Matthew Arnold
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
Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge. -- Matthew Arnold
Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole. -- Matthew Arnold
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
Miracles are doomed; they will drop out like fairies and witchcraft, from ... -- Matthew Arnold
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
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
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
Nothing could moderate, in the bosom of the great English middle class, their passionate, absorbing, almost blood-thirsty clinging to life. -- Matthew Arnold
Creep into thy narrow bed, Creep, and let no more be said! -- Matthew Arnold
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man. -- Matthew Arnold
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
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
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
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
All knowledge is interesting to a wise man, and the knowledge of nature is interesting to all men. -- Matthew Arnold
The heart less bounding at emotion new, The hope, once crushed, less quick to spring again. -- Matthew Arnold
Cutlure looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, - the passion for sweetness and light. -- Matthew Arnold
Time, so complain'd of, Who to no one man Shows partiality, Brings round to all men Some undimm'd hours. -- Matthew Arnold
The free thinking of one age is the common sense of the next. -- Matthew Arnold
Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly. -- Matthew Arnold
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
The love of science, and the energy and honesty in the pursuit of science, in the best of the Aryan races do seem to correspond in a remarkable way to the love of conduct, and the energy and honesty in the pursuit of conduct, in the best of the Semitic. -- Matthew Arnold
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. -- Matthew Arnold
Culture is the endeavour to know the best and to make this knowledge prevail for the good of all humankind. -- Matthew Arnold
Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world. -- Matthew Arnold
The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can. -- Matthew Arnold
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
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
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
The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion. -- Matthew Arnold
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. -- Matthew Arnold
This strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims. -- Matthew Arnold
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
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
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
We must hold fast to the austere but true doctrine as to what really governs politics and saves or destroys states. Having in mind things true, things elevated, things just, things pure, things amiable, things of good report; having these in mind, studying and loving these, is what saves states. -- Matthew Arnold
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
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
Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends; Nature and man can never be fast friends. Fool, if thou canst not pass her, rest her slave! -- Matthew Arnold
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
Strew on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew! In quiet she reposes; Ah, would that I did too! -- Matthew Arnold
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
The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I. -- Matthew Arnold
Now, the whole world hears
Or shall hear,
surely shall hear, at the last,
Though men delay, and doubt, and faint, and fail,
That promise faithful:
"Fear not, little flock!
It is your Father's will and joy, to give
To you, the Kingdom"! -- Matthew Arnold
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
I knew the mass of men conceal'd Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd They would by other men be met With blank indifference. -- Matthew Arnold
To see the object as in itself it really is -- Matthew Arnold
On Sundays, at the matin-chime, The Alpine peasants, two and three, Climb up here to pray; Burghers and dames, at summer's prime, Ride out to church from Chamberry, Dight with mantles gay, But else it is a lonely time Round the Church of Brou. -- Matthew Arnold
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
Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern. -- Matthew Arnold
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
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
The brave, impetuous heart yields everywhere to the subtle, contriving head. -- Matthew Arnold
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
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
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! -- Matthew Arnold
To thee only God granted A heart ever new: To all always open; To all always true. -- Matthew Arnold
The sterner self of the Populace likes bawling, hustling, and smashing; the lighter self, beer. -- Matthew Arnold
Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore. -- Matthew Arnold
Spare me the whispering, crowded room, the friends who come and gape and go, the ceremonious air of gloom - all, which makes death a hideous show. -- Matthew Arnold
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
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
Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class. -- Matthew Arnold
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
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
Resolve to be thyself; and know, that he who finds himself, loses his misery. -- Matthew Arnold
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
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
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
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
Mind is a light which the Gods mock us with, To lead those false who trust it. -- Matthew Arnold
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
But there remains the question: what righteousness really is. The method and secret and sweet reasonableness of Jesus. -- Matthew Arnold
Coleridge: poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium. -- Matthew Arnold
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
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
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
Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret. -- Matthew Arnold
Miracles do not happen. -- Matthew Arnold
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
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
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. -- Matthew Arnold
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
Not a having and a resting, but a growing and becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it. -- Matthew Arnold
Indeed there can be no more useful help for discovering what poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and can therefore do us most good, than to have always in one's mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry. -- Matthew Arnold
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
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
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
They ... who await
No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate. -- Matthew Arnold
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
Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur. -- Matthew Arnold
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
Ah! two desires toss about The poet's feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude. -- Matthew Arnold
One has often wondered whether upon the whole earth there is anything so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is really going, as an ordinary young Englishman of our upper class. -- Matthew Arnold
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
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
Not deep the poet sees, but wide. -- Matthew Arnold
France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme. -- Matthew Arnold
Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall. -- Matthew Arnold
We do not what we ought; What we ought not, we do; And lean upon the thought That chance will bring us through; But our own acts, for good or ill, are mightier powers. -- Matthew Arnold
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
Grey time-worn marbles Hold the pure Muses. In their cool gallery, By yellow Tiber, They still look fair. -- Matthew Arnold
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
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
Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well. -- Matthew Arnold
Most men in a brazen prison live, Where, in the sun's hot eye, With heads bent o'er their toil, they languidly Their lives to some unmeaning taskwork give, Dreaming of nought beyond their prison-wall. -- Matthew Arnold
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
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
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
Once read thy own breast right, And thou hast done with fears. -- Matthew Arnold
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
Religion
that voice of the deepest human experience. -- Matthew Arnold
History - a vast Mississippi of falsehoods -- Matthew Arnold
Everything in our political life tends to hide from us that there is anything wiser than our ordinary selves. -- Matthew Arnold
The grand stye arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject. -- Matthew Arnold
Come, dear children, let us away; Down and away below! -- Matthew Arnold
What is it to grow old? Is it to lose the glory of the form, The lustre of the eye? Is it for Beauty to forego her wreath? Yes; but not this alone. -- Matthew Arnold
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
Hither and thither spins The wind-borne mirroring soul, A thousand glimpses wins, And never sees a whole. -- Matthew Arnold
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
But thou, my son, study to make prevail One colour in thy life, the hue of truth. -- Matthew Arnold
And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty's heightening ... -- Matthew Arnold
Humid the air! Leafless, yet soft as spring. The tender purple spray on copse and briers! And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, she needs not June for beauty's heightening. Lovely all the time she lies ... -- Matthew Arnold
Cruel, but composed and bland,
Dumb, inscrutable and grand,
So Tiberius might have sat,
Had Tiberius been a cat. -- Matthew Arnold
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
Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born. -- Matthew Arnold
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. -- Matthew Arnold
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
Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul. -- Matthew Arnold
ForTime, not Corydon, hath conquered thee. -- Matthew Arnold
But the modern critic not only permits a false practice: he absolutely prescribes false aims." A true allegory of the state of one's mind in a representative history," the poet is told, "is perhaps the highest thing that one can attempt in the way of poetry. -- Matthew Arnold
The strongest part of a religion today is its unconscious poetry -- Matthew Arnold
With aching hands and bleeding feet
We dig and heap, lay stone on stone;
We bear the burden and the heat
Of the long day, and wish 'twere done.
Not till the hours of light return
All we have built do we discern. -- Matthew Arnold
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things. -- Matthew Arnold
All the live murmur of a summer's day. -- Matthew Arnold
Sad Patience, too near neighbour to despair. -- Matthew Arnold
Philistinism! - We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing. -- Matthew Arnold
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
Religion is ethics heightened, enkindled, lit up by feeling -- Matthew Arnold
Force and right are the governors of this world; force till right is ready. -- Matthew Arnold
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. -- Matthew Arnold
Was Christ a man like us?-Ah! let us try If we then, too, can be such men as he! -- Matthew Arnold
I keep saying, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, you are as obscure as life is. -- Matthew Arnold
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
The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light. -- Matthew Arnold
Six years-six little years-six drops of time. -- Matthew Arnold
Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men. -- Matthew Arnold
For this is the true strength of guilty kings, When they corrupt the souls of those they rule. -- Matthew Arnold
A wanderer is man from his birth. He was born in a ship On the breast of the river of Time. -- Matthew Arnold
Culture is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one -- Matthew Arnold
The bent of our time is towards science, towards knowing things as they are ... -- Matthew Arnold
Morality represents for everybody a thoroughly definite and ascertained idea: the idea of human conduct regulated in a certain manner. -- Matthew Arnold
The discipline of the Old Testament may be summed up as a discipline teaching us to abhor and flee from sin; the discipline of the New Testament, as a discipline teaching us to die to it. -- Matthew Arnold
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
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
For science, God is simply the stream of tendency by which all things seek to fulfill the law of their being. -- Matthew Arnold
And we forget because we must and not because we will. -- Matthew Arnold
And we forget because we must -- Matthew Arnold
And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know, Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure, Didst tread on earth unguess'd at. Better so! All pains the immortal spirit must endure, All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow, Find their sole speech in that victorious brow. -- Matthew Arnold
I do not believe today everything I believed yesterday I wonder will I believe tomorrow everything I believe today. -- Matthew Arnold
Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good. -- Matthew Arnold
Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection. -- Matthew Arnold
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
Let the long contention cease! / Geese are swans, and swans are geese. -- Matthew Arnold
Choose equality. -- Matthew Arnold
Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn Lent it the music of its trees at dawn? -- Matthew Arnold
That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation. -- Matthew Arnold
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
In mystery our soul abides. -- Matthew Arnold
It is so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done. -- Matthew Arnold
Where great whales come sailing by, Sail and sail, with unshut eye, Round the world for ever and aye. -- Matthew Arnold
We mortal millions live alone. -- Matthew Arnold
On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called History, a foam-bell more or less is no consequence. -- Matthew Arnold
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
All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science. -- Matthew Arnold
Men of culture are the true apostles of equality -- Matthew Arnold
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. -- Matthew Arnold
Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair. -- Matthew Arnold
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
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
Journalism is literature in a hurry. -- Matthew Arnold
Waiting from heaven for the spark to fall. -- Matthew Arnold
O strong soul, by what shore Tarriest thou now? For that force, Surely, has not been left vain! -- Matthew Arnold
Who hesitate and falter life away, and lose tomorrow the ground won today. -- Matthew Arnold
Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age, More fortunate, alas! than we, Which without hardness will be sage, And gay without frivolity. -- Matthew Arnold
Culture is the passion for sweetness and light, and (what is more) the passion for making them prevail. -- Matthew Arnold
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
Truth sits upon the lips of dying men. -- Matthew Arnold
And amongst us one, Who most has suffer'd, takes dejectedly His seat upon the intellectual throne. -- Matthew Arnold
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
One thing only has been lent to youth and age in common
discontent. -- Matthew Arnold
Life is the application of noble and profound ideas to life. -- Matthew Arnold
The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness ; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience . -- Matthew Arnold
We are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I do not know. -- Matthew Arnold
Weary of myself, and sick of asking
What I am, and what I ought to be,
At this vessel's prow I stand, which bears me
Forwards, forwards, o'er the starlit sea. -- Matthew Arnold
The eloquent voice of our century uttered, shortly before leaving the world, a warning cry against the Anglo- Saxon contagion. -- Matthew Arnold
For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion. -- Matthew Arnold
Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread. -- Matthew Arnold
Life is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming. -- Matthew Arnold
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
Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece, Long since, saw Byron 's struggle cease. -- Matthew Arnold
To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive. -- Matthew Arnold
If Paris that brief flight allow, My humble tomb explore! It bears: Eternity, be thou My refuge! and no more. -- Matthew Arnold
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
Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge. -- Matthew Arnold
It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think. -- Matthew Arnold
Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty. -- Matthew Arnold
Life is not having and getting, but being and becoming -- Matthew Arnold
The kings of modern thought are dumb. -- Matthew Arnold
The eternal not ourselves that makes for righteousness. -- Matthew Arnold
How many minds
almost all the great ones
were formed in secrecy and solitude! -- Matthew Arnold
