Culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.
MATTHEW ARNOLDFor 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.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.
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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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The grand stye arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.
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All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science.
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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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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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If there ever comes a time when the women of the world come together purely and simply for the benefit of mankind, it will be a force such as the world has never known.
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Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge.
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The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
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Genius is mainly an affair of energy.
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Ah! two desires toss about The poet’s feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.
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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.
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I keep saying, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, you are as obscure as life is.
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Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good.
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Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.
MATTHEW ARNOLD






