Is it so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the sky, to have loved, to have thought, to have done?
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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Style … is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it.
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Culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.
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Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.
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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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Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?
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Who hesitate and falter life away, and lose tomorrow the ground won today.
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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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Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.
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On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called History, a foam-bell more or less is no consequence.
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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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All knowledge is interesting to a wise man, and the knowledge of nature is interesting to all men.
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Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.
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Ah, love, let us be true To one another!
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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.
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Time, so complain’d of, Who to no one man Shows partiality, Brings round to all men Some undimm’d hours.
MATTHEW ARNOLD






