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.
MATTHEW ARNOLDAll knowledge is interesting to a wise man, and the knowledge of nature is interesting to all men.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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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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Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.
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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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Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
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Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.
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And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well — but ’tis not true!
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Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
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Time may restore us in his course Goethe’s sage mind and Byron’s force: But where will Europe’s latter hour Again find Wordsworth’s healing power?
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On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called History, a foam-bell more or less is no consequence.
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It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.
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Who hesitate and falter life away, and lose tomorrow the ground won today.
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To thee only God granted A heart ever new: To all always open; To all always true.
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Genius is mainly an affair of energy.
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Tis not to see the world As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes, And heart profoundly stirred; And weep, and feel the fullness of the past, The years that are not more.
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Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?
MATTHEW ARNOLD