Culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.
MATTHEW ARNOLDAt 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.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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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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This strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims.
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I do not believe today everything I believed yesterday I wonder will I believe tomorrow everything I believe today.
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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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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.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Let the long contention cease! / Geese are swans, and swans are geese.
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I keep saying, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, you are as obscure as life is.
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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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Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.
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The sophist sneers: Fool, take Thy pleasure, right or wrong! The pious wail: Forsake A world these sophists throng! Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.
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The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.
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Culture is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one
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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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How many minds–almost all the great ones–were formed in secrecy and solitude!
MATTHEW ARNOLD