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 ARNOLDResolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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Sanity — that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power.
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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.
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Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest, and admiration.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Greatness is a spiritual condition.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.
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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Ah! two desires toss about The poet’s feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.
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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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The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.
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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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The grand stye arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.
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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.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age, More fortunate, alas! than we, Which without hardness will be sage, And gay without frivolity.
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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.
MATTHEW ARNOLD