Matthew Arnold Quotes

Let me go back for a moment to Bishop Wilson, who says:−−'First, never go against the best light you have;
secondly, take care that your light be not darkness.

Vain is the effort to forget.
Some day I shall be cold, I know,
As is the eternal moonlit snow
Of the high Alps, to which I go — But ah, not yet, not yet!

Vain is the agony of grief.
'Tis true, indeed, an iron knot
Ties straitly up from mine thy lot,
And were it snapt — thou lov'st me not!
But is despair relief?

In mystery our soul abides.

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.

On the mind of an adversary one never makes the faintest impression.

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; 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; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically.

We should conceive of poetry worthily, and more highly than it has been the custom to conceive of it. We should conceive of it as capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies, than those which in general men have assigned to it hitherto. More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.

Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.

Waiting from heaven for the spark to fall.

The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.

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.

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

Are ye too changed, ye hills? See, ’tis no foot of unfamiliar men Tonight from Oxford up your pathway strays! Here came I often, often, in old days; Thyrsis and I; we still had Thyrsis then.

Singing, "Here came a mortal, But faithless was she: And alone dwell for ever The kings of the sea."