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.
MATTHEW ARNOLDArt still has truth. Take refuge there.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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Now 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.
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Who hesitate and falter life away, and lose tomorrow the ground won today.
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Life is the application of noble and profound ideas to life.
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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.
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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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And we forget because we must and not because we will.
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Greatness is a spiritual condition.
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Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.
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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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Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?
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All the live murmur of a summer’s day.
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All knowledge is interesting to a wise man, and the knowledge of nature is interesting to all men.
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Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.
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It 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
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Culture is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one
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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.
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Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
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For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.
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Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.
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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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Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul.
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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.
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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?
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Philistinism! – We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.
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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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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