Genius is mainly an affair of energy.
MATTHEW ARNOLDLet the long contention cease! / Geese are swans, and swans are geese.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
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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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One thing only has been lent to youth and age in common–discontent.
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For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.
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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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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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The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.
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Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?
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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.
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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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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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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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Not deep the poet sees, but wide.
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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 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.
MATTHEW ARNOLD






