Quotes by Matthew Arnold
Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.
Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.
Journalism is literature in a hurry.
Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.
Light half-believers of our casual creeds, who never deeply felt, nor clearly will d, whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds, whose vague resolves never have been fulfilled.
The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.
Unquiet souls. In the dark fermentation of earth, in the never idle workshop of nature, in the eternal movement, yea shall find yourselves again.
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.
It is so small a think to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done.
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.
Greatness is a spiritual condition.
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.
Once pass'd I blindfold here, at any hour, Now seldom come I, since I came with him....
"Fenced early in this cloistral round Of reverie, of shade, of prayer,...
Still doth the soul, from its lone fastness high, Upon our life a ruling effluence send....
With aching hands and bleeding feet We dig and heap, lay stone on stone; We bear the burden and the heat Of the long day, and wish 'twere done. Not till the hours of light return All we have built as we discern.
'Tis not to see the world As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes, And heart profoundly stirred; And weep, and feel the fullness of the past, The years that are not more.
Her cabined, ample spirit, It fluttered and failed for breath. Tonight it doth inherit The vasty hall of death.
Life is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming.
O life unlike to ours! Who fluctuate idly without term or scope,...
Strew on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew! In quiet she reposes; Ah, would that I did too!
But—if you cannot give us ease— Last of the race of them who grieve...
The sea is calm to-night. The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits;—
