I am bound by my own definition of criticism : a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.
MATTHEW ARNOLDCulture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.
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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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Let the long contention cease! / Geese are swans, and swans are geese.
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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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History – a vast Mississippi of falsehoods
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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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I knew the mass of men conceal’d Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal’d They would by other men be met With blank indifference.
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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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Men of culture are the true apostles of equality
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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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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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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.
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And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.
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Who hesitate and falter life away, and lose tomorrow the ground won today.
MATTHEW ARNOLD