All knowledge is interesting to a wise man, and the knowledge of nature is interesting to all men.
MATTHEW ARNOLDTo have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.
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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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Below 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.
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All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science.
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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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I keep saying, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, you are as obscure as life is.
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The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.
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Not deep the poet sees, but wide.
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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.
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Life is not having and getting, but being and becoming
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Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age, More fortunate, alas! than we, Which without hardness will be sage, And gay without frivolity.
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Once read thy own breast right, And thou hast done with fears.
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I do not believe today everything I believed yesterday I wonder will I believe tomorrow everything I believe today.
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Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest, and admiration.
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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.
MATTHEW ARNOLD






