Matthew Arnold Famous Quotes & Sayings
100 Matthew Arnold Famous Sayings, Quotes and Quotation.
And we forget because we must and not because we will. 
Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection. More pictures »
For this is the true strength of guilty kings, When they corrupt the souls of those they rule. More pictures »
The world hath failed to impart the joy our youth forebodes; failed to fill up the void which in our breasts we bear. More pictures »
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. More pictures »
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, freelynourished, and not bound by them.
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Where great whales come sailing by, Sail and sail, with unshut eye, Round the world for ever and aye. More pictures »
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. More pictures »
The brave, impetuous heart yields everywhere to the subtle, contriving head. 
A wanderer is man from his birth. He was born in a ship On the breast of the river of Time. More pictures »
Mind is a light which the Gods mock us with, To lead those false who trust it. 
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. More pictures »
The sea is calm tonight.The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;- on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
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Religion is ethics heightened, enkindled, lit up by feeling 
For eager teachers seized my youth, pruned my faith and trimmed my fire. Showed me the high, white star of truth, there bade me gaze and there aspire. More pictures »
Morality represents for everybody a thoroughly definite and ascertained idea: the idea of human conduct regulated in a certain manner. More pictures »
Culture is the passion for sweetness and light, and (what is more) the passion for making them prevail. More pictures »
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. More pictures »
The man who to untimely death is doomed Vainly would hedge him in from the assault of harm; He bears the seed of ruin in himself. More pictures »
The Sea of FaithWas once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
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Choose equality. 
To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive. More pictures »
Cutlure looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, - the passion for sweetness and light. More pictures »
In our English popular religion the common conception of a future state of bliss is that of ... a kind of perfected middle-class home, with labour ended, the table spread, goodness all around, the lost ones restored, hymnody incessant. More pictures »
He spoke, and loos'd our heart in tears. He laid us as we lay at birth On the cool flowery lap of earth. More pictures »
Below the surface stream, shallow and light, Of what we say and feel below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel, there flows With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed. More pictures »
He will find one English book and one only, where, as in the "Iliad" itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible. More pictures »
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. More pictures »
Society may be imagined so uniform that one education shall be suitable for all its members; we have not a society of that kind, nor has any European country. More pictures »
All pains the immortal spirit must endure,All weakness that impairs, all griefs that bow,
Find their sole voice in that victorious brow.
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And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,She needs not June for beauty's heightening ...
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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. More pictures »
Indeed there can be no more useful help for discovering what poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and can therefore do us most good, than to have always in one's mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry. More pictures »
However, if I shall live to be eighty I shall probably be the only person left in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific publications. More pictures »
The study of letters is the study of the operation of human force, of human freedom and activity; the study of nature is the study of the operation of non-human forces, of human limitation and passivity. The contemplation of human force and activity tends naturally to heighten our own force and activity; the contemplation of human limits and passivity tends rather to check it. Therefore the men who have had the humanistic training have played, and yet play, so prominent a part in human affairs, in spite of their prodigious ignorance of the universe. More pictures »
Beautiful city! ... spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age ... her ineffable charm ... Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic! More pictures »
Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties! More pictures »
O born in days when wits were fresh and clear, And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames; Before this strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims, Its heads o'ertax'd, its palsied hearts, was rife. 
Six years-six little years-six drops of time. 
Eutrapelia . "A happy and gracious flexibility," Pericles calls this quality of the Athenians ... lucidity of thought, clearness and propriety of language, freedom from prejudice and freedom from stiffness, openness of mind, amiability of manners. 
Culture is the endeavour to know the best and to make this knowledge prevail for the good of all humankind. 
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. 
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. 
This strange disease of modern life,With its sick hurry, its divided aims.
The free thinking of one age is the common sense of the next. 
What is it to grow old? Is it to lose the glory of the form, The lustre of the eye? Is it for Beauty to forego her wreath? Yes; but not this alone. 
Man errs not that he deems His welfare his true aim, He errs because he dreams The world does but exist that welfare to bestow. 
Good poetry does undoubtedly tend to form the soul and character; it tends to beget a love of beauty and of truth in alliance together, it suggests, however indirectly, high and noble principles of action, and it inspires the emotion so helpful in making principles operative. 
Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair. 
The heart less bounding at emotion new, The hope, once crushed, less quick to spring again. 
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. 
Truth illuminates and gives joy; and it is by the bond of joy, not of pleasure, that men's spirits are indissolubly held. 
O strong soul, by what shore Tarriest thou now? For that force, Surely, has not been left vain! 
No, thou art come too late, Empedocles!And the world hath the day, and must break thee,
Not thou the world. With men thou canst not live,
Their thoughts, their ways, their wishes, are not thine;
And being lonely thou art miserable,
For something has impair'd they spirit's strength,
And dried its self-sufficing font of joy.
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. 
Dreams dawn and fly: friends smile and die, Like spring flowers. Our vaunted life is one long funeral. Men dig graves, with bitter tears, For their dead hopes; and all, Mazed with doubts, and sick with fears, Count the hours. 
We mortal millions live alone. 
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.
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. 
We are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I do not know. 
That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation. 
Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur. 
Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore. 
The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light. 
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. 
The power of the Latin classic is in character , that of the Greek is in beauty . Now character is capable of being taught, learnt, and assimilated: beauty hardly. 
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 advancingonly he His soul well-knit, and all his battles won, Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.
English civilization the humanizing, the bringing into one harmonious and truly humane life, of the whole body of English society that is what interests me. 
What really dissatisfies in American civilisation is the want of the interesting, a want due chiefly to the want of those two great elements of the interesting, which are elevation and beauty. 
Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passionthe passion for sweetness and light. It has one even yet greater, the passion for making them all prevail. It is not satisfied till we all come to a perfect man; it knows that the sweetness and light of the few must be imperfect until the raw and unkindly masses of humanity are touched with sweetness and light.
And amongst us one, Who most has suffer'd, takes dejectedly His seat upon the intellectual throne. 
But thou, my son, study to make prevail One colour in thy life, the hue of truth. 
In mystery our soul abides. 
They ... who awaitNo gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.
Miracles are doomed; they will drop out like fairies and witchcraft, from ... 
And we forget because we must 
On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called History, a foam-bell more or less is no consequence. 
But there remains the question: what righteousness really is. The method and secret and sweet reasonableness of Jesus. 
Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good. 
Unquiet souls. In the dark fermentation of earth, in the never idle workshop of nature, in the eternal movement, yea shall find yourselves again. 
The eternal not ourselves that makes for righteousness. 
Waiting from heaven for the spark to fall. 
But the modern critic not only permits a false practice: he absolutely prescribes false aims." A true allegory of the state of one's mind in a representative history," the poet is told, "is perhaps the highest thing that one can attempt in the way of poetry. 
Truth sits upon the lips of dying men. 
Religionthat voice of the deepest human experience.
Weary of myself, and sick of asking What I am, and what I ought to be,
At this vessel's prow I stand, which bears me
Forwards, forwards, o'er the starlit sea.
And we are here as on a darkling plainSwept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
God's Wisdom and God's Goodness!Ah, but fools Mis-define thee, till God knows them no more. Wisdom and goodness they are God!
what schools Have yet so much as heard this simpler lore. This no Saint preaches, and this no Church rules: 'Tis in the desert, now and heretofore.
Culture is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one 
And see all sights from pole to pole, And glance, and nod, and hustle by; And never once possess our soul Before we die. 
Onlybut this is rare
When a beloved hand is laid in ours,
When, jaded with the rush and glare
Of the interminable hours,
Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,
When our world-deafen'd ear
Is by the tones of a loved voice caress'd
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.
A man becomes aware of his life's flow,
And hears its winding murmur; and he sees
The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.
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. 
Art still has truth. Take refuge there. 
To thee only God granted A heart ever new: To all always open; To all always true. 
The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can. 
Coldly, sadly descends The autumn evening. The Field Strewn with its dank yellow drifts Of wither'd leaves, and the elms, Fade into dimness apace, Silent; hardly a shout From a few boys late at their play! 
Was Christ a man like us?-Ah! let us try If we then, too, can be such men as he! 
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. 
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. 
Nothing could moderate, in the bosom of the great English middle class, their passionate, absorbing, almost blood-thirsty clinging to life.