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 ARNOLDCulture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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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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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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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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On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called History, a foam-bell more or less is no consequence.
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Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.
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A wanderer is man from his birth. He was born in a ship On the breast of the river of Time.
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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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Greatness is a spiritual condition.
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Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
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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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To thee only God granted A heart ever new: To all always open; To all always true.
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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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Let the long contention cease! / Geese are swans, and swans are geese.
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Genius is mainly an affair of energy.
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All knowledge is interesting to a wise man, and the knowledge of nature is interesting to all men.
MATTHEW ARNOLD