The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
MATTHEW ARNOLDNature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
-
-
Greatness is a spiritual condition.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
The grand stye arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Let the long contention cease! / Geese are swans, and swans are geese.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
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.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
How many minds–almost all the great ones–were formed in secrecy and solitude!
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
And we forget because we must and not because we will.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
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.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
One thing only has been lent to youth and age in common–discontent.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
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.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Ah! two desires toss about The poet’s feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
And see all sights from pole to pole, And glance, and nod, and hustle by; And never once possess our soul Before we die.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.
MATTHEW ARNOLD