Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.
MATTHEW ARNOLDJoy 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.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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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.
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Life is the application of noble and profound ideas to life.
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One thing only has been lent to youth and age in common–discontent.
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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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Whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all.
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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?
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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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Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.
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For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.
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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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Once read thy own breast right, And thou hast done with fears.
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How many minds–almost all the great ones–were formed in secrecy and solitude!
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Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge.
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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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Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.
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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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The grand stye arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.
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Life is not having and getting, but being and becoming
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Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.
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Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.
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Force and right are the governors of this world; force till right is ready.
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And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well — but ’tis not true!
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Genius is mainly an affair of energy.
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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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I keep saying, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, you are as obscure as life is.
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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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