The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
MATTHEW ARNOLDYears hence, perhaps, may dawn an age, More fortunate, alas! than we, Which without hardness will be sage, And gay without frivolity.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
-
-
Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
The sophist sneers: Fool, take Thy pleasure, right or wrong! The pious wail: Forsake A world these sophists throng! Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Ah, love, let us be true To one another!
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
I knew the mass of men conceal’d Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal’d They would by other men be met With blank indifference.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Philistinism! – We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
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.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
The eternal not ourselves that makes for righteousness.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Journalism is literature in a hurry.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Ah! two desires toss about The poet’s feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
How many minds–almost all the great ones–were formed in secrecy and solitude!
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
The bent of our time is towards science, towards knowing things as they are.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Who hesitate and falter life away, and lose tomorrow the ground won today.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
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 -
The brave, impetuous heart yields everywhere to the subtle, contriving head.
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 -
Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Now the great winds shoreward blow Now the salt tides seaward flow Now the wild white horses play Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Yes! in the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone.
MATTHEW ARNOLD