quotes from classic

Towns are full of people, houses full of tenants, hotels full of guests, trains full of travelers, caf?s full of customers, parks full of promenaders, consulting-rooms of famous doctors full of patients, theatres full of spectators, and beaches full of bathers. What previously was, in general, no problem, now begins to be an everyday one, namely, to find room.

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An unemployed existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.

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In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.

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We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.

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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.

more quotes from Matthew Arnold

Greatness is a spiritual condition.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Unquiet souls. In the dark fermentation of earth, in the never idle workshop of nature, in the eternal movement, yea shall find yourselves again.

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Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.

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Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.

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The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.

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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.

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

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Journalism is literature in a hurry.

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Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.

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Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.

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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.

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With close-lipped Patience for our only friend, Sad Patience, too near neighbor to Despair.

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