Matthew Arnold Quotes

Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul.

But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us - to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.

Come to me in my dreams, and then
By day I shall be well again.
For then the night will more than pay
The hopeless longing of the day.

If an historian be an unbeliever in all heroism, if he be a man who brings every thing down to the level of a common mediocrity, depend upon it, the truth is not found in such a writer.

One must, I think, be struck more and more the longer one lives, to find how much in our present society a man's life of each day depends for its solidity and value upon whether he reads during that day, and far more still on what he reads during it.

For this is the true strength of guilty kings, When they corrupt the souls of those they rule.

O strong soul, by what shore Tarriest thou now? For that force, Surely, has not been left vain!

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.

Not a having and a resting, but a growing and becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.

All this I bear, for, what I seek, I know: Peace, peace is what I seek, and public calm: Endless extinction of unhappy hates.

Physician of the Iron Age, Goethe has done his pilgrimage. He took the suffering human race, He read each wound, each weakness clear
And struck his finger on the place, And said
Thou ailest here, and here.

All pains the immortal spirit must endure,
All weakness that impairs, all griefs that bow,
Find their sole voice in that victorious brow.

Cutlure looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, - the passion for sweetness and light.

Nature herself seems, I say, to take the pen out of his hand, and to write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power.

Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece, Long since, saw Byron 's struggle cease.

Most men eddy about Here and there-eat and drink, Chatter and love and hate, Gather and squander, are raised Aloft, are hurled in the dust, Striving blindly, achieving Nothing; and then they die- Perish;-and no one asks Who or what they have been.

Waiting from heaven for the spark to fall.

Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge.

Without poetry our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.

History - a vast Mississippi of falsehoods

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

Nature's great law, and the law of all men's minds? To its own impulse every creature stirs: Live by thy light, and Earth will live by hers.

The love of science, and the energy and honesty in the pursuit of science, in the best of the Aryan races do seem to correspond in a remarkable way to the love of conduct, and the energy and honesty in the pursuit of conduct, in the best of the Semitic.

Tis the gradual furnace of the world,
In whose hot air poor spirits are upcurl'd
Until they crumple, or else grow like steel-
Which kills in us the bloom, the youth, the spring-
Which leaves the fierce necessity to feel,
But takes away the power- this can avail,
By drying up our joy in everything,
To make our former pleasures all seem stale.

- Tristram and Iseult

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.

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.

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.

Alas, is even Love too weak to unlock the heart and let it speak? Are even lovers powerless to reveal To one another what indeed they feel?

The kings of modern thought are dumb.

Come, dear children, let us away; Down and away below!

The free thinking of one age is the common sense of the next.

For science, God is simply the stream of tendency by which all things seek to fulfill the law of their being.

Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends; Nature and man can never be fast friends. Fool, if thou canst not pass her, rest her slave!

Poetry interprets in two ways: it interprets by expressing, with magical felicity, the physiognomy and movements of the outward world; and it interprets by expressing, with inspired conviction, the ideas and laws of the inward world of man's moral and spiritual nature. In other words, poetry is interpretative both by having natural magic in it, and by having moral profundity.

To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.

To thee only God granted A heart ever new: To all always open; To all always true.

A wanderer is man from his birth. He was born in a ship On the breast of the river of Time.

Saw life steadily and saw it whole.

Strew on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew! In quiet she reposes; Ah, would that I did too!

I do not believe today everything I believed yesterday I wonder will I believe tomorrow everything I believe today.

Most men in a brazen prison live, Where, in the sun's hot eye, With heads bent o'er their toil, they languidly Their lives to some unmeaning taskwork give, Dreaming of nought beyond their prison-wall.

And we forget because we must and not because we will.

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 do we discern.

Life is the application of noble and profound ideas to life.

And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know, Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure, Didst tread on earth unguess'd at. Better so! All pains the immortal spirit must endure, All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow, Find their sole speech in that victorious brow.

Truth illuminates and gives joy; and it is by the bond of joy, not of pleasure, that men's spirits are indissolubly held.

Miracles do not happen.

This strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims.

Nor bring, to see me cease to live,
Some doctor full of phrase and fame,
To shake his sapient head, and give
The ill he cannot cure a name.

Religion is ethics heightened, enkindled, lit up by feeling

France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.

Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep, Where the winds are all asleep; Where the spent lights quiver and gleam; Where the salt weed sways in the stream.

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.

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

It does not try to reach down to the level of inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or that sect of its own, with ready-made judgments and watchwords of its own. It seeks to away with classes, to make the best that has been taught and known in the world current everywhere, to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely
nourished, and not bound by them.

The Greek word euphuia, a finely tempered nature, gives exactly the notion of perfection as culture brings us to perceive it; a harmonious perfection, a perfection in which the characters of beauty and intelligence are both present, which unites "the two noblest of things"
as Swift ... most happily calls them in his Battle of the Books, "the two noblest of things, sweetness and light.

Ah! two desires toss about The poet's feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.

We must hold fast to the austere but true doctrine as to what really governs politics and saves or destroys states. Having in mind things true, things elevated, things just, things pure, things amiable, things of good report; having these in mind, studying and loving these, is what saves states.

All knowledge is interesting to a wise man, and the knowledge of nature is interesting to all men.

The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.

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.

One has often wondered whether upon the whole earth there is anything so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is really going, as an ordinary young Englishman of our upper class.

Now the great winds shoreward blow Now the salt tides seaward flow Now the wild white horses play Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.

On Sundays, at the matin-chime, The Alpine peasants, two and three, Climb up here to pray; Burghers and dames, at summer's prime, Ride out to church from Chamberry, Dight with mantles gay, But else it is a lonely time Round the Church of Brou.

The world hath failed to impart the joy our youth forebodes; failed to fill up the void which in our breasts we bear.

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.

What shelter to grow ripe is ours? What leisure to grow wise?

The will is free; Strong is the soul, and wise, and beautiful; The seeds of godlike power are in us still; Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes, if we will!

The highest reach of science is, one may say, an inventive power, a faculty of divination, akin to the highest power exercised in poetry; therefore, a nation whose spirit is characterised by energy may well be eminent in science; and we have Newton. Shakspeare [sic] and Newton: in the intellectual sphere there can be no higher names. And what that energy, which is the life of genius, above everything demands and insists upon, is freedom; entire independence of all authority, prescription and routine, the fullest room to expand as it will.

We cannot kindle when we will The fire which in the heart resides, The spirit bloweth and is still, In mystery our soul abides: But tasks in hours of insight will'd Can be through hours of gloom fulfill'd.

No, no! The energy of life may be Kept on after the grave, but not begun; And he who flagg'd not in the earthly strife, From strength to strength advancing
only he His soul well-knit, and all his battles won, Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.

Culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.

Youth dreams a bliss on this side of death. It dreams a rest, if not more deep, More grateful than this marble sleep; It hears a voice within it tell: Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well. 'Tis all perhaps which man acquires, But 'tis not what our youth desires.

The interpretations of science do not give us this intimate sense of objects as the interpretations of poetry give it; they appeal to a limited faculty, and not to the whole man. It is not Linnaeus or Cavendish or Cuvier who gives us the true sense of animals, or water, or plants, who seizes their secret for us, who makes us participate in their life; it is Shakspeare [sic] ... Wordsworth ... Keats ... Chateaubriand ... Senancour.

The slightest deviation from the line of clear conviction - the least turning to left or right in order to cocker a prejudice or please an audience or flatter a class, showed a want of delicacy - a preference of present popularity to permanent self-respect - which he could never have indulged in himself, and with difficulty tolerated in others. He had nothing but contempt for philosophical politicians with a turn for swimming with the stream, and philosophical divines with the same turn.

The heart less bounding at emotion new, The hope, once crushed, less quick to spring again.

The eloquent voice of our century uttered, shortly before leaving the world, a warning cry against the Anglo- Saxon contagion.

Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!

The discipline of the Old Testament may be summed up as a discipline teaching us to abhor and flee from sin; the discipline of the New Testament, as a discipline teaching us to die to it.

But so many books thou readest, But so many schemes thou breedest, But so many wishes feedest, That thy poor head almost turns.

Like driftwood spares which meet and pass Upon the boundless ocean-plain, So on the sea of life, alas! Man nears man, meets, and leaves again.

And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well
but 'tis not true!

The eternal not ourselves that makes for righteousness.

Where great whales come sailing by, Sail and sail, with unshut eye, Round the world for ever and aye.

What actions are the most excellent? Those, certainly, which most powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections: to those elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time. These feelings are permanent and the same; that which interests them is permanent and the same also.

Culture is the passion for sweetness and light, and (what is more) the passion for making them prevail.

How many minds
almost all the great ones
were formed in secrecy and solitude!

I am bound by my own definition of criticism: a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.

Mind is a light which the Gods mock us with, To lead those false who trust it.

I knew the mass of men conceal'd Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd They would by other men be met With blank indifference.

There is no better motto which it [culture] can have than these words of Bishop Wilson, "To make reason and the will of God prevail."

And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty's heightening ...

Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.

If there ever comes a time when the women of the world come together purely and simply for the benefit of mankind, it will be a force such as the world has never known.

At the present moment two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is.

For rigorous teachers seized my youth,
And purged its faith, and trimm'd its fire,
Show'd me the high, white star of Truth,
There bade me gaze, and there aspire.
Even now their whispers pierce the gloom:
What dost thou in this living tomb?

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

Life is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming.

Time, so complain'd of, Who to no one man Shows partiality, Brings round to all men Some undimm'd hours.

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