Matthew Arnold Quotes

And they see, for a moment,
Stretching out, like the desert
In its weary, unprofitable length,
Their faded ignoble lives.

While the locks are yet brown on thy head,
While the soul still looks through thine eyes,
While the heart still pours
The mantling blood to thy cheek,
Sink, O Youth, in thy soul!
Yearn to the greatness of Nature!
Rally the good in the depths of thyself.

Culture is the most resolute enemy of anarchy, because of the great hopes and designs for the State which culture teaches us to nourish.

Resolve to be thyself; and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.

Venid a mí en mis sueños, y luego durante el día estaré bien otra vez. Porque entonces la noche más que pagará el anhelo desesperado del día.

People think that I can teach them style. What stuff it all is! Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.

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.

However, if I shall live to be eighty I shall probably be the only person left in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific publications.

The crown of literature is poetry.

If what distinguishes the greatest poets is their powerful and profound application of ideas to life, which surely no good critic will deny, then to prefix to the word ideas here the term moral makes hardly any difference, because human life itself is in so preponderating a degree moral. It is important, therefore, to hold fast to this: that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life — to the question, How to live. Morals are often treated in a narrow and false fashion, they are bound up with systems of thought and belief which have had their day, they are fallen into the hands of pedants and professional dealers, they grow tiresome to some of us. We find attraction, at times, even in a poetry of revolt against them; in a poetry which might take for its motto Omar Khayam's words: "Let us make up in the tavern for the time which we have wasted in the mosque." Or we find attractions in a poetry indifferent to them, in a poetry where the contents may be what they will, but where the form is studied and exquisite. We delude ourselves in either case; and the best cure for our delusion is to let our minds rest upon that great and inexhaustible word life, until we learn to enter into its meaning. A poetry of revolt against moral ideas is a poetry of revolt against life; a poetry of indifference towards moral ideas is a poetry of indifference towards life.

A beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.

Coleridge, poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.

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

And as long as the world lasts, all who want to make progress in righteousness will come to Israel for inspiration, as to the people who have had the sense for righteousness most glowing and strongest; and in hearing and reading the words Israel has uttered for us, carers for conduct will find a glow and a force they could find nowhere else.

Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.

This is the aim of the following essay: to show that, when we come to put the right construction on the Bible, we give to the Bible a real experimental basis, and keep on this basis throughout; instead of any basis of unverifiable assumption to start with, followed by a string of other unverifiable assumptions of the like kind, such as the received theology necessitates.
And this aim we cannot seek without coming in sight of another aim, too, which we have often and often pointed out, and tried to recommend: 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.