The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
MATTHEW ARNOLDNature’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.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
-
-
The grand stye arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Life is the application of noble and profound ideas to life.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
But there remains the question: what righteousness really is. The method and secret and sweet reasonableness of Jesus.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
To thee only God granted A heart ever new: To all always open; To all always true.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
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 -
Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.
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 -
Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.
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 -
The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
How many minds–almost all the great ones–were formed in secrecy and solitude!
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 -
Life is not having and getting, but being and becoming
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
The brave, impetuous heart yields everywhere to the subtle, contriving head.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
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 -
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.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science.
MATTHEW ARNOLD -
Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?
MATTHEW ARNOLD