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 ARNOLDLet the long contention cease! / Geese are swans, and swans are geese.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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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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However, 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.
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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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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.
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I keep saying, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, you are as obscure as life is.
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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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Art still has truth. Take refuge there.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
It is – last stage of all When we are frozen up within, and quite The phantom of ourselves To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man
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Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
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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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Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good.
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Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.
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History – a vast Mississippi of falsehoods
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The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.
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Men of culture are the true apostles of equality
MATTHEW ARNOLD






