Quotes by Matthew Arnold
I do not believe today everything I believed yesterday I wonder will I believe tomorrow everything I believe today.
Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.
Resolve to be thyself and know, that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
Resolve to be thyself; and know, that he Who finds himself, loses his misery.
It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.
One moment, on the rapid's top, our boat Hung poised —and then the darting river of Life...
And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty's heightening...
...what thwarts us and demands of us the greatest effort is also what can teach us most.
It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking at it that one overcomes it but, rather, often by working on the one next to it. Certain people and certain things require to be approached on an angle.
Eternal passion! Eternal pain!
If experience has established any one thing in this world, it has established this: that it is well for any great class and description of men in society to be able to say for itself what it wants, and not to have other classes, the so-called educated and intelligent classes, acting for it as its proctors, and supposed to understand its wants and to provide for them. A class of men may often itself not either fully understand its wants, or adequately express them; but it has a nearer interest and a more sure diligence in the matter than any of its proctors, and therefore a better chance of success.
But each day brings its petty dust Our soon-chok'd souls to fill, And we forget because we must, And not because we will.
Cruel, but composed and bland, Dumb, inscrutable and grand, So Tiberius might have sat, Had Tiberius been a cat.
—No, no thou hast not felt the lapse of hours! For what wears out the life of mortal men?...
Whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all.
