The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.
MATTHEW ARNOLDBelow 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.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
-
-
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 -
Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Not deep the poet sees, but wide.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
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 -
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.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
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.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well — but ’tis not true!
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 -
But there remains the question: what righteousness really is. The method and secret and sweet reasonableness of Jesus.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Greatness is a spiritual condition.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Tis not to see the world As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes, And heart profoundly stirred; And weep, and feel the fullness of the past, The years that are not more.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Is it so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the sky, to have loved, to have thought, to have done?
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
They… who await. No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good.
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 -
How many minds–almost all the great ones–were formed in secrecy and solitude!
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
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.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
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.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Yes! in the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Once read thy own breast right, And thou hast done with fears.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.
MATTHEW ARNOLD