Quotes by Matthew Arnold
Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.
Spare me the whispering, crowded room, the friends who come and gape and go, the ceremonious air of gloom - all, which makes death a hideous show.
Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest and admiration.
Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.
To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.
It is so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done.
Sad Patience, too near neighbour to despair.
Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.
Not a having and a resting, but a growing and becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.
France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.
And we forget because we must and not because we will.
Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.
Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.
Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
But each day brings its petty dust our soon-choked souls to fill, and we forget because we must, and not because we will.
The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.
The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.
Resolve to be thyself; and know that who finds himself, loses his misery.
Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.
Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.
This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims.
Protestantism has the method of Jesus with His secret too much left out of mind; Catholicism has His secret with His method too much left out of mind; neither has His unerring balance, His intuition, His sweet reasonableness. But both have hold of a great truth, and get from it a great power.
With close-lipped Patience for our only friend, Sad Patience, too near neighbor to Despair.
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.
