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.
MATTHEW ARNOLDHowever, 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.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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Greatness is a spiritual condition.
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History – a vast Mississippi of falsehoods
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Genius is mainly an affair of energy.
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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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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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To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.
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For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.
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Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science.
MATTHEW ARNOLD