Coleridge: poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.
MATTHEW ARNOLDColeridge: poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.
MATTHEW ARNOLDThe 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 ARNOLDNow the great winds shoreward blow Now the salt tides seaward flow Now the wild white horses play Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.
MATTHEW ARNOLDCulture, 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 ARNOLDIf 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 ARNOLDAnd we forget because we must and not because we will.
MATTHEW ARNOLDSanity — 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 ARNOLDThe pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
MATTHEW ARNOLDIt 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
MATTHEW ARNOLDJoy 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.
MATTHEW ARNOLDFor poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.
MATTHEW ARNOLDThey… who await. No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.
MATTHEW ARNOLDCulture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.
MATTHEW ARNOLDTime 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?
MATTHEW ARNOLDLife is not having and getting, but being and becoming
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.
MATTHEW ARNOLD