Matthew Arnold Quotes

Still nursing the unconquerable hope, Still clutching the inviolable shade, With a free, onward impulse brushing through, By night, the silver’d branches of the glade.

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light. He who works for sweetness and light, works to make reason and the will of God prevail. He who works for machinery, he who works for hatred, works only for confusion. Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.

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.

And amongst us one, Who most has suffer’d, takes dejectedly His seat upon the intellectual throne.

And these, all labouring for a lord,
Eat not the fruit of their own hands:
Which is the heaviest of all plagues,
To that man's mind, who understands.

- The Sick King in Bokhara

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.

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

To thee only God granted A heart ever new: To all always open; To all always true.

He who would love his fellow man
Must not expect too much of him.

Culture . . . seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of 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.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

The strongest part of a religion today is its unconscious poetry

Is it so small a thing
To have enjoy'd the sun,
To have liv'd light in the spring,
To have lov'd, to have thought, to have done;
To have advanc'd true friends, and beat down baffling foes...?

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