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.
MATTHEW ARNOLDLet the long contention cease! / Geese are swans, and swans are geese.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.
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Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.
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Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.
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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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This strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims.
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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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All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science.
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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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Style … is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it.
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For this is the true strength of guilty kings, When they corrupt the souls of those they rule.
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The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.
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The bent of our time is towards science, towards knowing things as they are.
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Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.
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Genius is mainly an affair of energy.
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Nor bring, to see me cease to live, Some doctor full of phrase and fame, To shake his sapient head, and give The ill he cannot cure a name.
MATTHEW ARNOLD