One thing only has been lent to youth and age in common–discontent.
MATTHEW ARNOLDThe pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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And see all sights from pole to pole, And glance, and nod, and hustle by; And never once possess our soul Before we die.
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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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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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Genius is mainly an affair of energy.
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Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.
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Ah, love, let us be true To one another!
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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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Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.
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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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Time, so complain’d of, Who to no one man Shows partiality, Brings round to all men Some undimm’d hours.
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Time may restore us in his course Goethe’s sage mind and Byron’s force: But where will Europe’s latter hour Again find Wordsworth’s healing power?
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Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.
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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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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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The eternal not ourselves that makes for righteousness.
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And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.
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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.
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Joy comes and goes, hope ebbs and flows Like the wave; Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men. Love tends life a little grace, A few sad smiles; and then, Both are laid in one cold place, In the grave.
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Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.
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How many minds–almost all the great ones–were formed in secrecy and solitude!
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Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
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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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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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Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.
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Nature’s great law, and the law of all men’s minds? To its own impulse every creature stirs: Live by thy light, and Earth will live by hers.
MATTHEW ARNOLD