Matthew Arnold Quotes
Resolve to be thyself: and know, that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
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.
The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.
Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.
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.
To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.
Life is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming.
Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.
It is the last stage of all,
When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man.
Journalism is literature in a hurry.
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 beginning is always today.
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.
Alas! is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
Radiant with ardour divine!
Beacons of Hope ye appear!
Languor is not in your heart,
Weakness is not in your word,
Weariness not on your brow.
Miracles do not happen.
Yet they, believe me, who await
No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.
The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
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.
Nature, with equal mind,
Sees all her sons at play,
Sees man control the wind,
The wind sweep man away.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born.
Not deep the poet sees, but wide.
Weep bitterly over the dead, for he is worthy, and then comfort thyself; drive heaviness away: thou shall not do him good, but hurt thyself.
The will is free;
Strong is the soul, and wise, and beautiful;
The seeds of god-like power are in us still;
Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes, if we will!
The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.
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.
This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims.
Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.
All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science.
