Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age, More fortunate, alas! than we, Which without hardness will be sage, And gay without frivolity.
MATTHEW ARNOLDLife is the application of noble and profound ideas to life.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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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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Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge.
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At the present moment two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is.
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Life is not having and getting, but being and becoming
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It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.
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Nature’s great law, and the law of all men’s minds? To its own impulse every creature stirs: Live by thy light, and Earth will live by hers.
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For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.
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Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.
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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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And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.
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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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Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.
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Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.
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Coleridge: poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.
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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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All the live murmur of a summer’s day.
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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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Who hesitate and falter life away, and lose tomorrow the ground won today.
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Once read thy own breast right, And thou hast done with fears.
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Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.
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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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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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Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good.
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Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.
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Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.
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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.
MATTHEW ARNOLD