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 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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Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul.
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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.
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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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Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.
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Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
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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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Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?
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Sanity — that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power.
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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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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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All knowledge is interesting to a wise man, and the knowledge of nature is interesting to all men.
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The eternal not ourselves that makes for righteousness.
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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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Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.
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Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.
MATTHEW ARNOLD