Matthew Arnold Quotes About Culture
-
It does not try to reach down to the level of inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or that sect of its own, with ready-made judgments and watchwords of its own. It seeks to away with classes, to make the best that has been taught and known in the world current everywhere, to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely--nourished, and not bound by them.
→ -
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."
→ -
Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
→ -
Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.
→ -
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.
→ -
The Greek word euphuia, a finely tempered nature, gives exactly the notion of perfection as culture brings us to perceive it; a harmonious perfection, a perfection in which the characters of beauty and intelligence are both present, which unites "the two noblest of things" - as Swift most happily calls them in his Battle of the Books, "the two noblest of things, sweetness and light."
→ -
Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion--the passion for sweetness and light. It has one even yet greater, the passion for making them all prevail. It is not satisfied till we all come to a perfect man; it knows that the sweetness and light of the few must be imperfect until the raw and unkindly masses of humanity are touched with sweetness and light.
→ -
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 the passion for sweetness and light, and (what is more) the passion for making them prevail.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.
→ -
Men of culture are the true apostles of equality
→ -
Culture is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one
→ -
Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.
→
Related Authors
-
-
John Henry Newman Priest -
Lionel Trilling Literary critic -
Mark Twain Author -
Robert Browning Poet -
-
Walter Pater Critic -
Charles Dickens Writer -
Percy Bysshe Shelley Poet -
William Wordsworth Poet -
Alfred Lord Tennyson Poet -
Samuel Johnson Writer -
T. S. Eliot Playwright -
John Milton Poet -
Christina Rossetti Poet -
-
John Keats Poet -
John Ruskin Art critic -
-
George William Russell Writer