It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.
MATTHEW ARNOLDKnow, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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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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Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.
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Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul.
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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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The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
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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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If one were searching for the best means to efface and kill in a whole nation the discipline of self-respect, the feeling for what is elevated, he could do no better than take the American newspapers.
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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 is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one
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Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.
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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.
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Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
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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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But there remains the question: what righteousness really is. The method and secret and sweet reasonableness of Jesus.
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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 ARNOLD