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.
MATTHEW ARNOLDNor 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.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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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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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.
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Let the long contention cease! / Geese are swans, and swans are geese.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul.
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It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
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.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called History, a foam-bell more or less is no consequence.
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Force and right are the governors of this world; force till right is ready.
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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.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
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.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.
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Greatness is a spiritual condition.
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For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.
MATTHEW ARNOLD