On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called History, a foam-bell more or less is no consequence.
MATTHEW ARNOLDFor 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.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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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.
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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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Who hesitate and falter life away, and lose tomorrow the ground won today.
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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.
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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.
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Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.
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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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All the live murmur of a summer’s day.
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Come, dear children, let us away; Down and away below!
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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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I keep saying, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, you are as obscure as life is.
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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.
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Men of culture are the true apostles of equality
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Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.
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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.
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Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul.
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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.
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The eternal not ourselves that makes for righteousness.
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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.
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Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.
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Life is the application of noble and profound ideas to life.
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Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
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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.
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It is – 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
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To thee only God granted A heart ever new: To all always open; To all always true.
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They… who await. No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.
MATTHEW ARNOLD