Matthew Arnold Quotes

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.

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

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

The sea is calm tonight.The tide is full, the moon lies fairUpon the straits;- on the French coast the lightGleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

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

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

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.

And each day brings it's pretty dust, Our soon-choked souls to fll And we forget because we must, And not because we will.

To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.

Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.

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.

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.

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.

Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.

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

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

Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.

Culture is the passion for sweetness and light, and (what is more) the passion for making them prevail.

Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.

Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.

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

One thing only has been lent to youth and age in common—discontent.

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.

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.

Creep into thy narrow bed, Creep, and let no more be said!

Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.

And see all sights from pole to pole, And glance, and nod, and hustle by; And never once possess our soul Before we die.

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

It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.

Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.

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

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

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.

They... who await. No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.

The kings of modern thought are dumb.

The eternal not ourselves that makes for righteousness.

The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I.

It is - last stage of all When we are frozen up within, and quite The phantom of ourselves To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man

Is it so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the sky, to have loved, to have thought, to have done?

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.