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 ARNOLDThe brave, impetuous heart yields everywhere to the subtle, contriving head.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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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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On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called History, a foam-bell more or less is no consequence.
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Style … is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it.
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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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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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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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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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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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For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.
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Weep bitterly over the dead, for he is worthy, and then comfort thyself; drive heaviness away: thou shall not do him good, but hurt thyself.
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Not deep the poet sees, but wide.
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But there remains the question: what righteousness really is. The method and secret and sweet reasonableness of Jesus.
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History – a vast Mississippi of falsehoods
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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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Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.
MATTHEW ARNOLD