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 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
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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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The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.
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For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.
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Philistinism! – We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.
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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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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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Who hesitate and falter life away, and lose tomorrow the ground won today.
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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.
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Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.
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Greatness is a spiritual condition.
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Joy comes and goes, hope ebbs and flows Like the wave; Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men. Love tends life a little grace, A few sad smiles; and then, Both are laid in one cold place, In the grave.
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The bent of our time is towards science, towards knowing things as they are.
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I do not believe today everything I believed yesterday I wonder will I believe tomorrow everything I believe today.
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The eternal not ourselves that makes for righteousness.
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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