Life is not having and getting, but being and becoming
MATTHEW ARNOLDSanity — 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.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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History – a vast Mississippi of falsehoods
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Tis not to see the world As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes, And heart profoundly stirred; And weep, and feel the fullness of the past, The years that are not more.
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Who hesitate and falter life away, and lose tomorrow the ground won today.
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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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Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
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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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Below the surface stream, shallow and light, Of what we say and feel below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel, there flows With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed.
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How many minds–almost all the great ones–were formed in secrecy and solitude!
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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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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.
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But there remains the question: what righteousness really is. The method and secret and sweet reasonableness of Jesus.
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Time may restore us in his course Goethe’s sage mind and Byron’s force: But where will Europe’s latter hour Again find Wordsworth’s healing power?
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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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The power of the Latin classic is in character , that of the Greek is in beauty . Now character is capable of being taught, learnt, and assimilated: beauty hardly.
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France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.
MATTHEW ARNOLD






