Matthew Arnold Quotes

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"Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur."

"Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair."

"But each day brings its petty dust our soon-choked souls to fill, and we forget because we must, and not because we will."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"Greatness is a spiritual condition."

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

"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."

"Journalism is literature in a hurry."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next."

"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."

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

"The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion."

"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."

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

"Truth sits upon the lips of dying men."

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

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

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