But there remains the question: what righteousness really is. The method and secret and sweet reasonableness of Jesus.
MATTHEW ARNOLDThe pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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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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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.
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They… who await. No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.
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And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.
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Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.
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Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.
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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.
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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.
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Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?
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One thing only has been lent to youth and age in common–discontent.
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This strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims.
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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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Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.
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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.
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It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.
MATTHEW ARNOLD






