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 ARNOLDI am bound by my own definition of criticism : a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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Yes! in the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone.
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Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.
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Not deep the poet sees, but wide.
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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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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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Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?
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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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The need of expansion is as genuine an instinct in man as the need in a plant for the light, or the need in man himself for going upright. The love of liberty is simply the instinct in man for expansion.
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Men of culture are the true apostles of equality
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Genius is mainly an affair of energy.
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One thing only has been lent to youth and age in common–discontent.
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Coleridge: poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.
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Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.
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I knew the mass of men conceal’d Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal’d They would by other men be met With blank indifference.
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Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge.
MATTHEW ARNOLD