Matthew Arnold Quotes
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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.
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The brave, impetuous heart yields everywhere to the subtle, contriving head.
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To the Bible men will return; and why? Because they cannot do without it.
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Greatness is a spiritual condition.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Without poetry our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.
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The kings of modern thought are dumb.
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Truth illuminates and gives joy; and it is by the bond of joy, not of pleasure, that men's spirits are indissolubly held.
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Thou waitest for the spark from heaven! and we, Light half-believers of our casual creeds, Who never deeply felt, nor clearly will'd, Whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds, Whose vague resolves never have been fulfill'd; For whom each year we see Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new; Who hesitate and falter life away, And lose to-morrow the ground won to-day Ah! do not we, wanderer! await it too?
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The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
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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.
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Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?
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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.
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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.
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What actions are the most excellent? Those, certainly, which most powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections: to those elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time. These feelings are permanent and the same; that which interests them is permanent and the same also.
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Poetry interprets in two ways: it interprets by expressing, with magical felicity, the physiognomy and movements of the outward world; and it interprets by expressing, with inspired conviction, the ideas and laws of the inward world of man's moral and spiritual nature. In other words, poetry is interpretative both by having natural magic in it, and by having moral profundity.
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And see all sights from pole to pole, And glance, and nod, and hustle by; And never once possess our soul Before we die.
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How many minds--almost all the great ones--were formed in secrecy and solitude!
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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.
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Miracles do not happen.
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He spoke, and loos'd our heart in tears. He laid us as we lay at birth On the cool flowery lap of earth.
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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.
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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.
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Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.
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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.
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To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man.
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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.
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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.
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